Teamworking and performance: the extent and intensity of teamworking in the 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98)

Abstract

This article uses the 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey to address two main issues: whether a relationship between teamworking and performance can be said to exist; and, if it can, how that relationship might be explained. For the first of these we construct a variable that measures the extent of teamworking within an establishment. This is found to be positively and significantly related to productivity and financial performance. To address our second main issue we examine the idea that the key factor in performance is the degree of teams' decision-making autonomy. We look at this by constructing a measure of teamworking intensity. This is found to be positively and significantly associated with productivity and quality levels. Taken alongside other studies, these results are used to suggest that, in looking at the teamworking-performance relationship, the focus of attention should be on the structural properties of teams rather than the individual team members' experiences of work.

Keywords:

• teamworking
• performance
• autonomy
• WERS
• sociotechnical systems
• JCM