Self-management reduces the need for managers and allows the organization to reduce the levels in its organizational hierarchy. This requires that team members handle the internal social relations of the team. When they are successful, self-managing teams encourage the empowerment of employees and further improves the team member's professional and managerial skills. Most of the examples of SMT are with production and service workers. These work teams perform complex, but relatively routine tasks.
Employees are cross-trained so that they can work on different parts of the production process.
They also receive training on team work skills so that they can manage work assignments and internal relations. In most cases, these production SMT exist as part of an organizational development program which provides a protected or supportive environment for them. This type of team is very different from production teams because of their task differences. They work on complex projects requiring vastly different skills in a dynamic and complex work environment. Concurrent Engineering represents an opportunity to investigate the success of SMT under these conditions.