Project teaming in a democratic company context

ABSTRACT

Teaming in democracy generates knowledge, the raw material for innovation, the catalyst for development, progress and extroversion. Democratic teaming, rather than teaming per se, provides people with the space needed to speak and be heard, to give and share, to contribute and to co-evolve in a cooperative and non-competitive way. Democratic teaming belongs to applied philosophy, not applied management, generating added-value for organisations and a shared value for the society. The democratic teaming model is characterised by the principles of placing the right person in the right place at the right time and with the right scope. The model also presents the concept that teams have systemic, dynamic and agile structures, which are affected by the project they are called to serve, within organisationally lean and agile hierarchies for the maximum utilisation of employees’ intellectual capital. This paper presents the democratic teaming construct, concepts and approach within the company democracy model.

KEYWORDS:

• Applied philosophy
• democracy
• management
• team
• teaming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evangelos Markopoulos

Evangelos Markopoulos completed his BS (computer science, from the City University of New York, USA), MSc (computer science – artificial Intelligence from the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, USA), and PhD (ICT Project Management from the University of Piraeus, Greece). He worked mainly as a computer scientist at ΙΒΜ, USA (as applications programmer, systems programmer, systems engineer, systems architect), Siemens (satellite communications, PBX's TCP/IP), and at Bell Laboratories of AT&T (artificial intelligent and expert systems research on man machine languages and natural language processing). In his academic career, he taught (computer science and mathematics) as an adjunct professor, and worked as a research fellow in R&D programs, in Universities and Technical Institutions in Greece and aboard mainly in the department of informatics and relegated institutes and laboratories (Brunel University, UK; GAUSS Institute, Bremen Polytechnic, Germany; European Software Institute, Bilbao, Spain; The City University of New York, NY, USA; University of Piraeus, Greece; AT&T Bell Laboratories, Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems Development, USA), and others. His areas of expertise are project, program and process management & engineering, enterprise engineering, business transformation, knowledge & innovation management, and corporate & enterprise gamification.

Hannu Vanharanta

Hannu Vanharanta started his professional career in 1973 as a technical assistant at the Turku office of the Finnish Ministry of Trade and Industry. He worked for Finnish international engineering companies from 1975 to 1992, i.e. Jaakko Pöyry, Rintekno and Ekono as process engineer, section manager and leading consultant. His doctoral thesis was approved 1995. He was professor in business economics from 1995 to 1996 in the University of Joensuu. He served as purchasing and supply management professor from 1996 to 1998 in the Lappeenranta University of Technology. He has been professor from 1998 to 2016 September in industrial management and engineering in Tampere University of Technology (TUT) at Pori Campus. He has now retired from this TUT professorship but has visiting professorship in Poznan University of Technology, Poznan Poland and is active in Vaasa University as research fellow. The research interests are human resource management, knowledge management, strategic management, financial analysis, and decision support systems. He has had special interest in knowledge discovery and data mining. He has published many articles in financial analysis as well as text analysis. The ultimate goal in his research is to synthesise quantitative and qualitative/linguistic data/information/knowledge for strategic decision making.