Teaming up with temps: the impact of temporary workers on team social networks and effectiveness

ABSTRACT

Temporary workers offer immediate benefits to the bottom line; yet, it is unclear how incorporating temporary workers into teams affects how they function. We apply social identity theory to propose that temporary workers significantly reduce individual- and team-level networks and team effectiveness but that commitment to the leader and intergroup competition can help temporary and permanent employees work together more effectively. Using a sample of employees nested in teams (Study 1, n = 312), we found that status differences affected member interactions resulting in sparser advice and friendship networks for temporary workers compared to their permanent counterparts. At the team level (Study 2, n = 58), these team member differences or contract diversity impacted team functioning through advice networks, such that, teams with greater contract diversity had sparser networks and were less effective. Further, commitment to the leader was found to moderate the negative impact of contract diversity on advice and friendship network density. With the increasing use of temporary worker and the prevalent use of teams, these findings have broader implications for HR functions and present possible avenues to mitigate the negative consequences of temporary workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary employment
• teams
• team effectiveness
• social networks
• contract diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We did not add a Level 3 (organization) to our analysis because the number of organizations (n = 13) did not meet the threshold of 30–50 units required for including an additional level in the multilevel analysis (Maas & Hox, 2005). Therefore, we included country and sector as control variables.

2. Because educational level and tenure diversity did not consistently correlate with the main outcome variables, we excluded them from the final analyses. The results were also analysed with all of the control variables and remained consistent.

3. The results were also analysed with all of the control variables and remained consistent.

4. To test the robustness of these findings, we also analysed Hypothesis 5 with (a) teams with only one temporary employee, (b) teams with more than three members, and (c) teams with less than six members. Our findings are consistent across these samples.