You’ve heard of teams, right. Football teams, soccer teams rugby teams, team building at work. Often they have a team leader, but really the idea is all members working together to achieve a common goal.
Aircraft MRO teams can be built, but the key is to share the commitment to the objective. Without the commitment, the foundations will not be strong enough and like a building without foundations, will very likely fail!
The objective has to be a shared one, and a more important one to ALL the members than anything individual to them. Self-directed teams might fail at this point. This is the role of the team leader. He has to sell, guide, support or direct members to not just be self-motivated, but to have the commitment to a shared objective.
His means to achieve the shared objective are establishing ownership and enabling. Enabling can be educating, encouraging, providing resources, removing impediments to the achievement of objectives. For his part, a team leader can use health checks, performance management, and feedback.
Establishing ownership implies that the members themselves ultimately control their work, something that would produce anarchy if the common objective was not already firmly established. However, from ownership comes job satisfaction, trust in others, motivation, productivity, competitiveness. By definition, absenteeism and destructive behaviour is minimalised.
Self-directed teams succeed but, as with all groups of individuals, personalities within the team differ and a close analysis would probably expose a leader or leaders. Performance indicators and benchmarks are fine for guidance, but the ultimate incentive is that, at the end of the team task, pride in an objective achieved is strong motivation for future successes.