Demise of Teamwork and Rise of Mentoring

Wow, you are on the cutting, leading edge of management thinking!  It goes this way.  Jerry Apps, world-famous adult educator at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, has observed that how we manage in a time of high turnover and lack of tenure is different than the good old days of people working in one place for their entire work career.  Now, people turn over every 3-5 years.  This means they are not around long enough to engage in teamwork that amounts to anything.  It takes time to form teams, and with people coming and going, team stability is an ideal of the passing industrial age, factory model, assembly line processes.  Instead, what you face in your workplace is exactly the new that Apps describes in his classic study Leadership Philosophy for Adult Education.  In it he shows how mentoring, coaching will replace teamwork as the management paradigm.  It is amazing how our textbooks talk about teamwork, teamwork, teamwork, exactly when it more and more does not work due to lack of job tenure.  Enter coaching and mentoring, exactly what you have encountered in your workplace!  What you propose to study is on the cutting edge of OD today!  Keep in mind as you do this project for our course that you can recycle it into workshops, conference talks, articles, etc. that we need badly, although most folks do not know it yet.  Great project proposal!  Dr. Rux  P.S.  I know Apps personally and visited with him in fact last Saturday at a conference!