The Center for Workplace Transformation

Charles Heckscher and Saul Rubinstein, directors   School of Management and Labor Relations • Rutgers University   50 Labor Center Way • New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-8553   Tel: 732-932-9503 Email: info@cwt-ru.org

Mission:

The Center for Workplace Transformation advances the knowledge and practice of the widespread move from bureaucratic hierarchies to team-based, flexible work systems that can leverage resources across boundaries. It does this by: building collaborative research networks and projects; involving companies, unions, and other organizations in learning dialogues in which they can reflect on their experiences; providing education and consultation to organizations making this transition; and publicizing the case for organizational change and building a network of support.

Documents: Collaboration and the quality of health care delivery (draft) Powerpoint presentation The Firm as a Collaborative Community: introduction The Collaborative Enterprise: introduction The local union revisited: new voices from the front lines

Research and publications:

We have tested the idea that teamwork in medical care can make a significant difference in patient outcomes through fieldwork in acute cardiac care units observing interactions among the different providers, from nurses to nutritionists to doctors, and explore their effects. A paper based on that research has been submitted for publication, and others are in preparation.

We conducted research on on the conditions for collaborative organization in over 25 companies; the results were published in The Collaborative Enterprise, Yale University Press 2007.

A project on “collaborative community” explored the problem of the creation and maintenance of trust in complex knowledge-focused organizations. This brought together sociologists and political scientists with business researchers and practitioners for a series of discussions that built a common theoretical framework and a set of linked empirical studies. The outcome was published in 2006 as The Firm as a Collaborative Community (Oxford University Press).
Research on accountability in complex team-based organizations, based on interviews and observations in seven companies, were the basis of a PhD dissertation by Carlos Martin.

Next:

• We are conducting research on collaborative organization of school systems which will be the basis for a conference in the Fall of 2010.
• We are conducting a study on the value base of collaborative systems; an initial publication is a case study for Harvard Business School on the values transformation process at IBM. Research is ongoing at other companies.
• We are developing a survey to identify the degree of collaborative culture in organizations.