Download - Team Membership and the Experience of Work
Team Membership and the Experience of Work inBritain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data
Bill HarleyUniversity of Melbourne
abstract Positive accounts of teamwork emphasise its potential not just to improve
organisational performance, but to transform employees’ experience of work in
overwhelmingly positive ways. The key outcome is said to be enhanced employee
discretion, which in turn contributes to satisfaction, commitment and positive views of
management. Critical accounts of teamwork, which locate the phenomenon in the context
of the labour process argue that enhanced organisational performance from teams results
from an undermining of employee discretion, which contributes to work intensification
and increased stress for employees. Differences between the two accounts have not been
resolved, in part because of the fact that neither model has been subjected to rigorous
empirical scrutiny using reliable large-scale statistical data which allow generalisations to
be made about the impact of team membership on employees. Utilising the data from the
1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) it is possible to identify team
members and non-members and to compare them in terms of discretion, commitment,
satisfaction, relations with management, and stress. The analysis shows no statistically
significant association between team membership and any of the outcome variables and
on this basis, both positive and critical accounts are called into question.
Since at least the 1980s autonomous work teams have become increasingly
popular and have attracted a great deal of attention from academics (see Procter and
Mueller 2000). This paper seeks to contribute to academic debates about teamwork
by assessing the extent to which the experiences of key facets of work differ between
employees who are team members and those who are not. Differences between
positive and critical accounts of teamwork provide the paper’s rationale and
research agenda. Specifically, the paper seeks to elucidate a series of questions about
team membership and employee discretion, commitment, satisfaction, relations
with management and stress.
The unique contribution made by this paper is that, unlike existing positive and
critical accounts of teamwork, the analysis presented here is based on large-scale,
reliable statistical data drawn from a representative sample of workplaces and
employees in Britain. This means that for the first time it is possible to draw
Work, Employment & Society Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 721–742. Printed in the UK © 2001 BSA Publications Ltd
721
Bill Harley is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management, in the Department of
Management at The University of Melbourne.
conclusions about the experience of team membership which can be applied to the
population of British employees with confidence. That is, on the basis of the analysis
presented here it is possible to generalise about the experience of teamwork.
The paper is divided into three main sections. The first briefly reviews positive
and critical accounts of teamwork and, on the basis of the differences between them,
identifies a series of research questions. The second section of the paper provides
details of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) and the
construction of variables and the third presents the results of analysis of the data. In
the final section, the implications of the findings for our understanding of the
experience of teamwork are discussed.
Competing Accounts of Teamwork
While the view that team-based work can be traced back to ancient times is
highly questionable, it is nonetheless clear that this approach to work organisation
has a lengthy pedigree (Benders and van Hootegem 1999; Sewell 1999). Since the
1980s, however, there has been unprecedented managerial interest in teamwork
(Procter and Mueller 2000: 7) and it has been advocated with almost religious
fervour by management consultants and academics (for a typical example see
Moravec 1999). There is now a considerable body of research devoted to teamwork
and the purpose of the discussion which follows is to outline two broad approaches,
which are labelled ‘positive’ and ‘critical’ respectively. By positive accounts are meant
those which emphasise the effectiveness of teams in terms of organisational
performance and employee experience of work and which, implicitly or explicitly,
advocate this approach to work organisation. Critical accounts are those which
question the positive view and which emphasise the potential negative outcomes for
employees of team membership. In reviewing the two approaches, a research agenda
for the remainder of the paper will be established.
Positive accounts of teamworkIt is possible to identify a pervasive and central theme in positive accounts of
the impact of teamwork, which can be summarised as follows. Teamwork
‘empowers’ workers by providing them with the opportunity for increased control
over their work (Goodman et al 1988; Harley 1999; Sewell 1998). As a result of this
putative empowerment, it is argued, workers are more positively disposed to
workplace management, more committed to their organisations and able to make
greater use of their skills and problem-solving capabilities, all of which feed into
superior organisational performance (Dunphy and Bryant 1996).
This positive account is associated largely with US-based research which draws
on human resource management (HRM) and organisational behaviour (OB)
traditions and which highlights organisational performance as the raison d’être for
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teamwork. Katzenbach and Smith’s 1993 work The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the
High Performance Organization is an excellent example of this approach.
Katzenbach and Smith (1993: 12) argue that: ‘performance … is the primary
objective … a team remains the means, not the end [their emphasis] … [and] will
deliver results well beyond what individuals acting alone in nonteam working
situations could achieve’.
There are two major explanations of the role of teams in enhancing
organisational performance, both of which emphasise the importance of teams
being to some extent autonomous or self-managing. The first explanation, which
might be characterised as structural, draws on insights from socio-technical theory
(see Trist and Bamforth 1951; Cummings 1978) and suggests that teams involve work
processes that allow (indeed require) employees to be flexible and adaptable and to
modify their behaviour as necessary to meet performance goals (Cohen and
Ledford 1994). That is, to the extent that teams involve self-regulation or self-
control, team members can utilise their knowledge, skills and judgement to solve
production problems as they arise and to devise more effective work processes,
thereby enhancing productivity and efficiency (Cohen et al. 1996: 647–8). The
second explanation, which might be characterised as psychological, suggests that
teams feed into improved organisational outcomes via their positive effect on
employee orientations to work. Put simply, teams enhance employee discretion,
which in turn feeds into motivation, satisfaction and commitment (Pil and
Macduffie 1996: 434).
Neither of these arguments is unique to accounts of teamwork. Indeed, both can
be found in broader accounts of a variety of managerial practices characterised
variously as ‘empowerment’ (see Harley 1999),‘high commitment management’ (see
Wood and de Menezes 1998), ‘high involvement management’ (see Wood 1999) and
‘high performance work systems’ (see Appelbaum et al. 2000; Ramsay et al 2000).1
In common with these accounts, central to arguments about the efficacy of
teamwork is the role of employee discretion or autonomy at work. Both structural
and psychological explanations have at their hearts the claim that by enhancing
discretion, team-based work facilitates improved work processes and improved
orientations to work, from which flows improved organisational performance.
There are three aspects of positive accounts of teamwork which contribute to the
rationale for the research agenda of this paper. The first is the overwhelming
concern of most positive accounts of teamwork with issues of organisational
effectiveness, typically conceptualised in terms of productivity or product/service
quality (Batt and Applebaum 1995: 354–5; Dunphy and Bryant 1996; Janz et al. 1997;
Neck et al. 1999; Spreitzer et al. 1999). This concern is hardly surprising, given that
one of the features which distinguishes contemporary approaches to teamwork
from earlier forms of group-based work is that they are overwhelmingly managerially
implemented, explicitly as a means to enhance performance (Procter and Mueller
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 723
2000: 8–9). Nonetheless, in adopting a narrow managerialist conception of how one
might evaluate teams, many studies simply do not concern themselves with the
implications of teamwork for employees, thereby overlooking a highly problematic
area. That is, while positive accounts of teamwork make employees absolutely
central to their model of links from teamwork to organisational performance, few
actually research how employees experience teamwork. There is, therefore, a need
for research which looks explicitly at the experiences of employees.
Secondly, even those studies which are concerned with employee outcomes tend
to focus on associations between teamwork and positive employee attitudes,
commonly satisfaction and commitment (see Cohen et al. 1996; Corderey et al 1991;
Wall et al 1986). Implicit in much of the research which examines these issues is the
same managerialist agenda mentioned above, since the rationale for being
concerned with employee attitudes is that satisfied and committed employees will
contribute to organisational success (see Appelbaum et al. 2000). Moreover, in
focusing on positive attitudes, the research ignores the possibility that the
experience of teamwork might, in important ways, be negative for employees.
A third limitation of positive accounts of teamwork, which is at the heart of the
analysis presented in this paper, is that much of the literature presents enhanced
employee discretion as a given; that is, it is axiomatic that teams enhance discretion
(Benders and van Hootegem 1999: 617). In examining the impact of teamwork on
other employee outcomes there appears to be a tacit assumption made that
teamwork enhances discretion and because of this employees who work in teams are
more satisfied, committed and well-disposed towards management. It seems
entirely plausible that employees who experience greater discretion also tend to have
more favourable orientations to work, but to make the leap to concluding that teams
have positive outcomes because they enhance discretion is problematic. The
assumptions of most mainstream research render any consideration of the
association between teamwork and discretion apparently unnecessary.
Consideration of positive accounts of teamwork suggests that there are
important gaps in our knowledge. Firstly, limited attention has been given to
employee experiences of teamwork. Secondly, in studies of employee outcomes the
focus has been on positive employee attitudes, with an apparent blindness to any
negative outcomes for employees. Finally, there is a widespread assumption that
teamwork enhances employee discretion and that positive outcomes flow from this.
Before moving to specify the research questions to be addressed in the remainder of
the paper, however, consideration needs to be given to claims made by critics of
teamwork.
Critical accounts of teamworkA stark contrast to the positive accounts is provided by recent critical studies
of teamwork, which have utilised insights from labour process theory, and sociology
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more broadly (see for example: Sewell 1998, 1999; Barker 1993, 1999; Danford 1998;
Baldry et al 1998). Although there are differences of emphasis between different
critical accounts, the element which unites them is a concern with locating
teamwork in the context of the dynamics of capitalist production and therefore
considering the need for managerial control of the labour process to maximise
labour input. While critical studies, like positive studies, see teamwork as a means to
enhance organisational performance and while they make issues of employee
discretion central, they provide a different and much less sanguine view of teams
than that found in mainstream research.
The central argument put forward in many of the critical studies is that
teamwork, while apparently empowering employees, generates new forms of
control which assist management in extracting labour from employees via work
intensification (Marchington 2000: 61). For example, Barker (1993) characterises the
control which emerges from team-based work as ‘concertive control’ which involves
employees in teams monitoring their own, and each others’ behaviour, to an extent
that constrains their behaviour far more than traditional managerial/supervisory
control. Sewell (1998) also emphasises peer- and self-monitoring in his concep-
tualisation of ‘chimerical control’. As Thompson and McHugh put it ‘the
empowerment rhetoric is often empty and managerial prerogative largely intact’
(1995: 187). From this perspective, any discretion associated with teamwork is
illusory and may well mask increased managerial control of production, albeit via
team members monitoring their own and others’ performance.
Critical accounts almost invariably make employee experience of teamwork
absolutely central to their analyses and explicitly question the unitarist assumption
that positive employee experiences and improved organisational performance are
necessarily natural partners. A number of accounts stress that there is room for a
variety of employee experiences (eg. McCabe 2000). Others note that teams are
frequently used to intensify work with the result that employees are likely to
experience it in overwhelmingly negative ways in particular via heightened stress
(e.g. Findlay et al. 2000).
From a critical perspective then, the way in which teamwork can be conceptual-
ised as feeding into organisational performance is by making employees work
harder and thereby raising labour productivity. Thus, the key theoretical point
which emerges is that employees in teams are less likely than other employees to
enjoy high levels of discretion over their work, since teamwork enhances managerial
control, and more likely to be stressed.
Research problemsThe preceding discussion has indicated that positive and critical accounts of
teamwork provide very different views of the phenomenon. In common, they both
conceptualise teamwork as contributing to improved organisational performance,
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 725
although the precise nature of the outcomes differs. Once we go beyond this issue,
the two approaches diverge in terms of the mechanisms which they propose as
leading to performance outcomes and the specific variables included in their
theoretical models. While both make discretion central to their analyses, each
conceptualises team membership as having a different impact on it. Further,
discretion is theorised as leading to different outcomes in each model. While the
models are not simply diametrically opposed, they provide competing interpre-
tations of the impact of teamwork on employees’ experience of work. Testing of the
competing claims of the two models provides a means by which to advance debates
on teamwork.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with issues of organisational
performance. Moreover, the paper does not propose to explore the extent of peer or
self-monitoring, or the degree of problem solving, innovation or skill utilisation,
associated with team membership. Rather, the concern is with the association
between team membership on one hand, and the range of positive and negative
experiences of work which the respective models contain. The decision to focus on
these aspects was made firstly because discretion is central to both models, yet has
received little attention in research and, secondly, because the associations involving
teams, discretion and employee experience of work have been neglected in earlier
work.
In order to advance the debates on teamwork, a number of questions require
elucidation. Firstly, is team membership positively associated with discretion? If it
is, this provides support for the positive account. If it is associated negatively with
discretion this provides support for the critical account. Secondly, is team
membership associated positively with favourable orientations to work? Such
associations would provide support for the positive account. Thirdly, is team
membership associated positively with stress? An affirmative response would
support the critics and suggest that positive accounts, in emphasising positive
outcomes, have provided a partial, and potentially misleading, assessment of
teamwork. Finally, is discretion a mediating variable in any associations between
positive employee attitudes and team membership? If it is, then the positive
accounts are supported. The remainder of the paper is devoted to seeking answers to
these questions and attempting to make sense of those answers as a means to
advance the debates on teamwork.
The WERS98 Data
In spite of their theoretical differences, both mainstream and critical
approaches have something in common methodologically. That is, both tend to be
based on quite limited evidence. Positive accounts have been based largely on case
studies and anecdotes (Neck et al. 1999: 246) or surveys in single establishments or
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industries (usually manufacturing) (Cohen and Ledford 1994: 14). This has been
remedied to some extent by the conduct of large-scale survey-based studies in
service sector organisations (Cohen and Ledford 1994; Janz et al. 1997; Spreitzer
1999). Similarly, critical accounts tend not to be based on analysis of large-scale
quantitative data sets, relying for the most part on case studies using ethnography
(e.g. Barker 1999) or some combination of qualitative method and within-
organisation surveys (e.g. Findlay et al. 2000). There has also been some use made of
multi-establishment surveys within industries (e.g. Delbridge et al. 2000). Lacking
in both positive and critical accounts is analysis of large-scale, statistically reliable
data of a kind which allows generalisations to be made across industry as a whole.2
This lack of research on teamwork based on reliable large-scale data is problematic
to the extent it restricts our capacity to say anything about the experience of
teamwork in a general sense.
The particular strength of using data from a large-scale quantitative data set is
that it allows us to make generalisations about the impact of teamwork, which can
be applied with reasonable confidence to British employees. Thus, within the
general limitations of survey methodology and the specific limitations of the
WERS98 (discussed in more detail below) this approach allows conclusions to be
drawn about the experience of teamwork which fill key gaps in current knowledge.
The data setThe most recent in the ongoing series of British Workplace Industrial
Relations Surveys (WIRS), the Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98),
was conducted in 1997–8. WERS98, following the lead of the 1995 Australian
Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS95), contained a survey of approxi-
mately 28,000 employees, drawn from the 2,000 workplaces which were included in
the main workplace survey. This feature allows the systematic analysis of the impact
of workplace practices on employees. Data from the employee survey can be linked
to items from the workplace surveys, thereby providing a means to explore
relationships between workplace characteristics on one hand and employee
experience on the other. More details on WERS98 can be found in Cully (1998) and
Cully et al. (1999).3
The decision to use the WERS98 data for this paper was made for four main
reasons. Firstly, WERS98 is a reliable large-scale survey which can be used to derive
findings about the experience of teamwork which can be applied to British
employees with a high degree of confidence. In this respect, it is unique and goes
beyond any of the data sets which have been used in the research on teamwork
discussed above.
Secondly, the unit of analysis for the surveys (at least for the employee survey,
which is the primary data source for this paper) is the individual worker. Elucidating
the questions pursued in this paper requires individual level data. Moreover,
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 727
because the employee data can be linked to workplace data it is possible to include in
the analysis both characteristics of individual employees and the workplaces in
which they work, thereby accounting for workplace, industry and sectoral
differences in employee outcomes.
Thirdly, the data set allows the identification of team members and non-
members with a high degree of confidence. Work using the AWIRS95 data (see
Harley 1999) which dealt with associations between particular workplace practices
and employee outcomes allowed identification of employees who worked in
workplaces with particular practices present, but was unable to assess whether the
employees whose responses were utilised were actually subject to a particular
practice. The WERS98 data set allows this limitation to be overcome.
Fourthly, the employee surveys collected data on a wide range of facets of
employees’ own experiences of work. Since the concern of the paper is with
employees’ self-reported experience of work this represents a major strength.
There are limitations which apply to findings made on the basis of analysis of
WERS98 data. Firstly, the WERS collected data from workplaces with ten or more
employees. This means that the findings can only be applied to employees in
workplaces which meet this size criterion, thereby excluding the significant number
of employees in smaller workplaces.4 Secondly, as is common to many large-scale
surveys, depth is sacrificed for breadth. That is, data are collected on a wide range of
phenomena, but not in great detail. The result of this limitation is that the analysis
does not provide a subtle or nuanced account of the experience of teamwork of the
kind provided by detailed qualitative accounts (see in particular Barker 1999 for an
ethnographic study of teamwork). Most notably, while the data tell us whether or
not employees are team members, they do not tell us a great deal about the kinds of
teams which employees are members of. This can be overcome to some extent, as the
discussion in the next section indicates, but it remains an important limitation.
Identifying team membersThe crux of this paper is whether team members and non-members report
different experiences of work. Therefore, a necessary first step was to identify
employees who fell into either category.
The procedure followed in constructing the team membership variable was as
follows. Firstly, using the variable CTEAMS it was possible to identify workplaces
where all members of the largest occupational group (LOG) were identified by
management as working in ‘formally designated teams’ and those where no
members of the LOG were in teams. It was then necessary to further restrict team
membership. There is considerable debate about the defining characteristics of
autonomous work teams and no agreed definition (see Benders and van Hootegem
1999; Marchington 2000). It seems likely that managers responding to the survey
would have had quite divergent views on what the term meant and presumably in
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recognition of this, the WERS98 survey contained a number of items on team
characteristics. These were deliberately constructed to capture facets of
autonomous teams which are widely deemed to differentiate them from other forms
of group-based work (Cully et al. 1999: 42–4).
Managers in workplaces with teams were asked if the following statements were
true: ‘Teamworking depends on team members working together’ (CTEAMHOA);
‘Team members are able to appoint their own team leaders’ (CTEAMHOB); ‘Team
members jointly decide how the work is to be done’ (CTEAMHOC); and ‘Teams are
given responsibility for specific products or services’ (CTEAMHOD). Cully et al.’s
(1999: 43) system for classifying teams using these items was employed (see Table 1).
Then, using a derived variable provided by the WERS project team it was
possible to identify employees who were non-managerial employees and members
of the largest occupational group in their workplace.5 A decision was made to
restrict the sample to non-managerial employees since the experience of those in
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 729
Table 1Team membership scale
Employees
Team membership characteristics n (row %)
Non-managerial employee not in a team 1502 (27.1)
Non-managerial employee in a team 1 (0.0)
Non-managerial employee in a team and members work with one another 241 (4.3)
Non-managerial employee in a team and members work with one another
and have responsibility for specific product or service 1406 (25.3)
Non-managerial employee in a team and members work with one another
and have responsibility for specific product or service and jointly decide
how work is to be done 2056 (37.0)
Non-managerial employee in a team and members work with one another
and have responsibility for specific product or service and jointly decide
how work is to be done and appoint their own team leaders 345 (6.2)
Total 5550 (100)
Data weighted to effective sample size (empwt_nr).
Note: The 5550 employees included in this table constitute only 19.7 per cent of all valid employee
responses included in the dataset. The following were excluded: managerial employees (2419; 8.6
per cent of employees); non-managerial employees who were not members of the largest
occupational group (LOG) (13275; 52.6 per cent of non-managerial employees); and non-
managerial employees who were LOG members but worked in workplaces where somewhere
between “none” and “all” non-managerial employees were team members (5931; 50.2 per cent of
non-managerial LOG members). These exclusions were required to guarantee that only non-
managerial team members and non-members were compared, but should be borne in mind when
considering the representativeness of the sample included in the remainder of the analysis.
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Table 2Employee outcome variables
Variables Mean (SD)
Discretion composite (alpha=.784)
‘In general, how much influence do you have about the range of tasks you
do?’ (A9A) 1.73 (1.02)
‘… the pace at which you work?’ (A9B) 1.91 (1.01)
‘… how you do your work?’ (A9C) 2.25 (.87)
Normative/affective commitment composite (alpha=.826)
‘Do you share many of the values of your organisation?’ (B5A) 3.42 (.92)
‘Do you feel loyal towards your organisation?’ (B5D) 3.67 (.94)
‘Are you proud to tell people who you work for?’ (B5E) 3.58 (.98)
Intrinsic job satisfaction composite (alpha=.764)
‘How satisfied are you with the amount of influence you have over your
job?’ (A10A) 3.52 (.96)
‘… with the sense of achievement you get from your work?’ (A10C) 3.59 (1.01)
‘… with the respect you get from supervisors/line managers?’ (A10D) 3.43 (1.14)
Management relations composite (alpha=.925)
‘How good would you say managers here are at keeping everyone up to
date about proposed changes?’ (B8A) 3.15 (1.14)
‘… providing everyone with the chance to comment on proposed
changes?’ (B8B) 2.86 (1.14)
‘… responding to suggestions from employees?’ (B8C) 2.93 (1.10)
‘… dealing with work problems you or others may have?’ (B8D) 3.27 (1.10)
‘… treating employees fairly?’ (B8E) 3.34 (1.13)
‘In general, how would you describe relations between managers and
employees here?’ (B9) 3.46 (1.07)
Job stress composite (alpha=.638)
‘Do you agree or disagree that your job requires that you work very
hard?’ (A8A) 3.97 (.82)
‘Do you agree or disagree that you never seem to have enough time to get
your job done?’ (A8B) 3.23 (1.07)
‘… that you worry a lot about your work outside working hours?’ (A8D) 2.56 (1.14)
All WERS98 attitude items coded on a scale of 1-5 of either agreement or satisfaction, except for
the job discretion/control items which were coded on a four-point (0-3) response scale (none, a
little, some, a lot). Composites are simple additive scales. In each case removal of any of the
individual items reduced Chronbach alpha for the scale. Statistics were calculated for the entire
sample and not just the sample of ‘Team Members and Non-Members’. All analysis weighted to
empwt_nr.
managerial jobs is likely to vary significantly from other employees. Those who were
members of the LOG and worked in a workplace where all members of the LOG
were in teams were assigned to one of the five categories set out above (which were
assigned values 1–5). Those who were in the LOG in workplaces where no LOG
members were in teams were assigned a value of 0. Those who were not in the LOG
or whose workplaces had between none and all LOG members in teams were coded
‘missing’ on this indicator, on the basis that it was not possible to be sure whether or
not they were in teams.6
Thus, the variable had values of: 1–5, depending on team characteristics, if an
employee was in a non-managerial job, a member of the LOG and worked in a
workplace where all LOG members worked in teams; 0 if an employee was in a non-
managerial job, a LOG member and worked in a workplace where no LOG members
worked in teams; missing if an employee was not a LOG member or if management
reported any proportion of LOG team membership other than none or all. A
frequency distribution for the variable is presented in Table 1.
The table indicates that virtually no team members work in teams which have
none of the characteristics of an autonomous team but that very few work in teams
which have all of them. Indeed, the largest single category (37.0 per cent) comprises
employees who work in teams which have all characteristics except the ability to
appoint their own team leader.
Since the concern of this paper is to differentiate between team members and
non-members, this scale was used to construct a dichotomous dummy variable in
which non-managerial employees not in teams were allocated a value of 0, those
who were in categories 4 and 5 were allocated a value of 1 and those who were in
categories 1 to 3 were coded as missing. The rationale for this approach is that it
allowed a degree of confidence that the team members included in the analysis were
members of teams which were as close as possible, within the limits of the WERS98
questions, to approximating fully autonomous teams. The dichotomous variable
had a distribution of 1,502 non-members and 2,401 members.7
Employee experienceThe variables used to capture employee experiences are presented in Table
2.8 The items used are indicators of: discretion; normative/affective commitment;
intrinsic job satisfaction; relations with management; and stress. The variables are
largely self-explanatory. Each is a simple additive scale of the individual items
specified in the table. In each case, the range of individual items comprising each
scale was selected on the basis that they were the best indicators of the various
phenomena available from the WERS98 data set. Factor analysis was then used to
confirm that each set of scales loaded on a single factor and Chronbach’s Alpha used
to assess reliability of scales. While the scales do not exhaust the range of employee
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 731
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Table 3Characteristics of employees, team members and non-members
Employee and All employees Non-members Members
workplace variables n Mean/% n Mean/% n Mean/%
Workplace
Size 28222 646 1502 166 2401 381
Age 27886 36 1496 30 2384 30
Union Density 27425 35 1482 30 2313 41
Ownership
UK (51% or more) 24314 86 1338 90 2132 89
Foreign (50% or more) 3849 14 156 10 269 11
Sector
Private 19363 69 1155 77 1421 59
Public 8859 31 346 23 980 41
Production Sector 6941 25 391 26 383 16
Employee
Gender
Male 14264 51 807 54 969 40
Female 13897 49 693 46 1432 60
Employment Status
Fixed Term 923 3 38 3 95 4
Temporary 1235 4 77 5 98 4
Permanent 25847 92 1376 92 2194 92
Working Hours
Less than 30 (PT) 8361 30 562 37 758 32
30 or more 16861 70 940 63 1644 68
Current Member
Union/ Staff Assoc. 10984 39 530 36 1193 50
Occupation
Managers/SenAdmin. 2419 9 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Professional 3088 11 101 7 595 25
Assoc. Prof. & Tech. 2238 8 5 0 175 7
Clerical & Secretarial 4981 18 191 13 428 18
Craft & Skilled Service 2878 10 276 18 144 6
Personal & Protective 3317 12 247 17 321 13
Sales 2580 9 154 10 373 16
Operative & Assembly 3651 13 337 23 294 12
Other 2855 10 190 13 70 3
Total Employees 28222 1501 2400
Analysis weighted to effective sample size (empwt_nr). The measure of union density used here is
a computed figure based on syntax provided by the WERS Data Dissemination Service.
outcomes which might be included in this analysis, nonetheless, they provide useful
indicators of all the key outcomes of interest.
Control variablesA number of variables were utilised which captured workplace and
employee characteristics which seemed likely to intervene in associations between
team membership and employee experience. Briefly, the rationale for inclusion of a
range of control variables in later analysis relates firstly to the fact that the context in
which teams operate is likely to influence outcomes (Benders et al. 1999: 3) and
secondly that employee outcomes are known to vary systematically with employee
characteristics (see Harley 1999) and industry or workplace characteristics (see
Singelmann and Mencken 1992). Table 3 presents distributions for these variables
for all employees, team members and team non-members.9
The Experience of Teamwork
The first question addressed here is whether team membership is associated
with any of the outcome variables. Table 4 presents results for bivariate correlation
analysis which suggest that team membership is positively and statistically
significantly, although weakly, associated with each of the variables.
There are also associations between the outcome variables. Discretion is
positively, quite strongly and statistically significantly associated with commitment,
satisfaction and management relations, which would be consistent with the main-
stream view that teamwork improves employees’ attitudes to work via enhanced
discretion. Discretion, however, is not significantly associated with stress.
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 733
Table 4Correlations between team membership and employee outcomes variables
Variable 1 2 3 4 5
1 Discretion 1
2 Normative/Affective
Commitment .341** 1
3 Intrinsic Satisfaction .502** .645** 1
4 Management Relations .275** .626** .621** 1
5 Stress �.011 .011** �.129** �.075** 1
6 Team Membership .089** .100** .055* .138** .130**
Coefficients are calculated using weighted data and significance levels are calculated using
unweighted data. Analysis restricted to team members and non-members only. No correction has
been made for multi-level survey design and this means that statistical significance levels are
inflated.
*p <.05 **p <.01
734b
ill ha
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Table 5Correlations between employee outcomes variables and workplace characteristics variables
Variable Size Age Union density UK ownership Private sector Production sector
Discretion �.016 �.013 �.080** .022** .012** .024**
Normative/Affective Commitment �.010** .014** �.051** �.019** �.041** �.096**
Intrinsic Satisfaction �.081** �.001 �.097** �.051** �.016 �.063**
Management Relations �.085** �.049** �.099** �.055** �.035** �.139**
Stress �.026* �.016 .041** �.038** �.127** �.078**
Coefficients are calculated using weighted data and significance levels are calculated using unweighted data. Analysis includes the total sample of employees.
No correction has been made for multi-level survey design and this means that statistical significance levels are inflated.
* p <.05 **p <.01
Table 6Correlations between employee outcomes variables and employee characteristics variables
Variable Female Perm. Fixed Temp. Hours Union Prof. A/Prof. Cler. Craft P/P Sales Op. Other
Discretion �.028** .039** .011 �.061** .113** �.071** .077** .037** �.021** �.009 �.038** �.053** �.113** �.059**
Normative/Affective Commitment .088** �.028** .017** .021 �.030 �.083** .053** �.006* �.025** �.102** .100** .020** �.145** �.038**
Intrinsic Satisfaction .104** �.037** .024** .027** �.072** �.129** .036** �.012* �.011** �.037** .066** �.003 �.134** .006
Management Relations .138** �.074** .034** .067** �.136** �.118** .028** �.006** .007 �.121** .083** .074** �.139** .014
Stress .042** .059** �.002** �.075** .216** .092** .220** .064** �.008** �.065** �.071** �.067** �.144** �.078**
Coefficients are calculated using weighted data and significance levels are calculated using unweighted data. Analysis includes the total sample of employees.
No correction has been made for multi-level survey design and this means that statistical significance levels are inflated.
* p <.05 **p <.01
These results could be interpreted as follows: team membership enhances
discretion, which leads to higher commitment and satisfaction and positive views of
management, but at the same time it is associated with stress, presumably due to
responsibilities associated with team membership and decision making. This
interpretation is tempting, but more detailed analysis is required before it can be
accepted. The most obvious problem with drawing conclusions based on simple
bivariate correlation is that the employee outcomes are likely to be influenced by a
range of factors besides team membership. Moreover, the data presented in Table 2
indicate that there are significant differences between team members and non-
members in terms of their individual characteristics and those of their workplaces.
There is, therefore, a need to consider the role of potentially intervening variables.
To explore this issue, bivariate correlation analysis between each of the outcome
variables and each of the workplace and employee variables was conducted. The
results appear in Tables 5 (workplace variables) and 6 (employee variables) and
show that by far the majority of the workplace and employee variables are
statistically significantly associated with employee outcomes. This suggests that they
need to be included in the analysis of associations between teamwork and outcomes.
As a means to integrate these potentially intervening variables in the analysis,
regression analysis was carried out. A separate regression model was run with each
of the outcome variables as the dependent variable, with the teamwork dummy and
all the workplace and employee characteristic variables as independent variables.
The results of this analysis are included in Table 7.10
The analysis shows that, once all the potentially intervening variables are
controlled for, the introduction of the team membership variable makes virtually no
difference to the r2 value for any model. Moreover, teamwork is not statistically
significantly associated with any of the employee experience variables. The results
suggest that there is no difference between team members and non-members in
terms of their reported levels of discretion, commitment, satisfaction, orientation to
management or stress.
This is a very significant finding. The failure to demonstrate the link between
team membership and discretion calls into question the assumption in the
mainstream literature that teamwork enhances discretion and the extension of that
assumption to the belief that it is via discretion that other positive outcomes arise. If
team membership does not enhance discretion, logically this cannot be the route
through which other outcomes emerge, although since the other outcomes do
not emerge, the issue of the role of discretion as a mediating variable becomes
irrelevant. The results also call into question the critical argument that teamwork
heightens effort and stress, either because of reduced discretion, or directly.
A further point which emerges from the analysis is that a number of the control
variables show very clear associations with outcomes. While the coefficients are not
big, nonetheless the results suggest that employees in production sector workplaces,
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 735
lowly unionised workplaces, who are in professional or personal/protective service
occupations or who work longer weekly hours tend to have higher discretion than
other employees. The key point to be made, however, is that team membership is
unimportant in determining discretion when compared to other factors, most
notably occupation. The importance of occupation has been demonstrated in a
number of other studies (see Harley 1999).11 The r2 for the discretion regression
model is only .065, which suggests that there are other factors accounting for
differences in discretion, but nonetheless the findings suggest that team member-
ship does not figure as a determinant of discretion.
736 bill harley
Table 7Regressions of employee outcome variables on workplace characteristics,employee characteristics and team membership
Dependent variables
Norm./Aff. Management
Independent variables Discretion commitment Satisfaction relations Stress
Step 1: Control variables
Size .086 �.004 .022 .032 .000
Age �.003 .014 �.001 �.027 .014
Union Density �.121* .066 .005 .023 �.077
UK Ownership .015 �.084 .017 �.072 .052
Private Sector �.025 .105 .106 .093 �.015
Production .167* �.026 .062 �.028 �.028
Female .026 .066* .087* .063 .097**
Permanent .018 �.021 �.024 �.062 .051
Weekly Working Hours .074* .008 �.020 �.002 .228**
Union/Staff Assoc. Member �.036 �.030 �.071 �.035 .105
Professional .227* .257* .190 .172 .368**
Assoc. Prof & Tech .082 .042 .008 .018 .068
Clerical & Secretarial .146 .082 .053 .094 .058
Craft & Skilled .014 .015 .017 �.093 .010
Personal & Protective .205* .275* .177 .187 .025
Sales .096 .163 .081 .134 .011
Operative & Assembly �.027 �.0009 �.067 �.079 �.073
Step 2: Team membership .044 .047 .057 .073 �.020
(all controls included in Step 2)
Step 1 adj R2 .064 .093 .073 .108 .252
Step 2 change in adj R2 .001 .001 .002 .004 .000
F change 1.856 1.319 3.571 2.171 .088
N 2808 2808 2808 2808 2808
Regression coefficients are standardized. Coefficients, R2 and N calculated using weighted data.
Significance levels and F change calculated using unweighted data.
*p <.05 **p <.01
A similar picture emerges with reference to commitment, satisfaction and stress,
with a number of the control variables showing statistically significant associations
with these variables. In particular, being a professional was significantly, and
relatively strongly, associated with each of the variables, with the association being
positive in all cases. Being female was positively and significantly associated with all
of them. Being a professional or personal and protective services employee was
positively associated with commitment. Being a professional or working long hours
was associated with stress. There were no statistically significant associations
involving relations with management. While it is possible to speculate about the
reason for the associations involving control variables, the important point is that
team membership is not a significant influence on outcome variables relative to
factors such as occupation, gender and working hours.
Discussion and Conclusion
The results leave positive and critical accounts of teamwork looking rather
forlorn. While teamwork does not, according to this analysis, herald a transform-
ation of work in which employees regain the discretion denied to them by Taylorist
work organisation, nor does it appear to involve reductions in discretion and hence
increased work intensification and stress. Put bluntly, according to the analysis
presented here, team membership does not matter much. In view of the fact that
other studies, albeit using different kinds of approaches, have found associations
between teamwork and outcomes for employees, how can we explain the lack of
associations found in this analysis?
Firstly, it may be that there are limitations inherent in the data and analytical
strategy which render it unable to find the theorised associations. One possible
problem, already alluded to, is that the teams in which the WERS98 respondents
worked were not ‘real’ teams, or at least the majority of them were not. From this
perspective, managers use the term ‘team’ loosely and tend to assign the appellation
to any group-based work. This is not a very compelling explanation. The criteria for
identification of team members used here were by design quite restrictive, precisely
to approximate autonomous teams as closely as possible.
Even putting this aside, this explanation is unconvincing, chiefly because it leads
into circularity and provides advocates of teamwork with an easy way out when
their sanguine view of teamwork is challenged. If, in spite of how teams were defined
in this paper, one were to argue that the explanation must be that they still were not
‘real’ teams, a certain circularity starts to emerge: teams are only teams if they
enhance employee autonomy and have other positive outcomes. If they do not, they
cannot be real teams. It is entirely possible that there are teams which do enhance
employee discretion, but the evidence presented here is that most British employees
who work in teams do not enjoy such outcomes.
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 737
It is also possible that the employee outcome variables generated from the
WERS98 data set are inadequate. Even if they are sufficient to capture key outcomes
of team membership they may be insufficiently subtle or nuanced to capture the
experience of teamwork adequately. Closely related to this is the possibility that the
models which were set up and (partially) tested are too crude to capture the
complexity of teamwork and its outcomes. It seems likely that the outcomes of team
membership are contingent and that there are considerable variations across
industry. Within a large data set like the WERS98, particularly when the analysis
relies on simple models, these variations may cancel each other out, thereby
providing a misleading picture at the aggregate level.
Undoubtedly the data set and analysis have limitations, but it seems unlikely that
these factors alone account for the findings. The WERS98 represents the largest,
most reliable and most current source of data on employee relations in Britain
available and the items on employee outcomes are for the most part well-established
measures which have been tested previously. Moreover, the statistical models
employed are entirely appropriate to the data and to the research problems under
investigation.
If it is accepted that the lack of associations between teamwork and employee
experience cannot be explained simply by limitations of data and analysis,
explanations must be sought elsewhere. Two explanations are proposed here.
The first, discussed in the first section of the paper, is that teams are managerially
driven and usually introduced as a means to enhance organisational performance.
Unfortunately the WERS98 survey did not ask managers about reasons for the
introduction of teams. There is, however, evidence that group work in Europe has
mostly been introduced by management, has involved very limited decision-making
rights for employees, and usually involves management rather than team members
controlling team membership and appointing team leaders (Benders et al 1999: vii).
Procter and Mueller (2000: 8–9) argue that a defining feature of the current wave of
teamwork is that it is managerially driven and aimed at improving performance,
rather than being a manifestation of concern with employee quality of working life.
To the extent that teamwork has as its rationale a primary concern with
performance improvement, it seems fanciful to expect major gains for employees to
emerge.
Secondly, it is possible that teams represent such minor adjustments to existing
hierarchical structures as to be negligible in effect. This critique of ‘new’ forms of
work organisation is well-rehearsed (see Harley 1999). Teamwork, like other
allegedly ‘empowering’ forms of work organisation is unlikely to present any
challenge to existing hierarchical structures in which power and influence are
exercised by virtue of one’s position. This argument finds support in the continuing
importance of occupation, not just for discretion, but for a range of facets of the
experience of work as demonstrated in the results presented above. Unless teams
738 bill harley
entail a fundamental reconfiguration of dominant patterns of work organisation
then they are unlikely to make a difference to employee discretion and via this to
orientations to work. It seems entirely plausible that there are real limitations to the
extent to which teams represent a genuine alternative to hierarchical forms of
organisation. Just as teamwork is generally too minor a modification to work to
enhance the experience, it is unlikely to involve a major degradation of work as
proposed by critics.
The findings presented in this paper suggest that both positive and critical
accounts of teamwork may have overstated the impact of this approach to work
organisation. Rigorous empirical analysis of reliable large-scale data has provided
no support for either account. It seems that the enthusiasm of positive accounts and
the dire warnings of the critics, may have been based on rather over-excited
evaluations of the extent to which teams represent a change to organisational forms
and patterns of work and the extent to which employees’ experiences of work are
touched by such practices.
notes1. The similarity between arguments about teamwork and these other approaches is not
surprising, since most conceptualisations of empowerment, high involvement
management, high commitment management and high performance work systems
include teamwork within the range of management practices considered (see Ramsay et al.
2000).
2. Two recent studies which have, inter alia, considered teamwork using large national-level
data sets are Harley (1999) and Ramsay et al. (2000), although neither had teamwork as its
primary focus.
3. The roles of the Department of Trade and Industry, the Advisory, Conciliation and
Arbitration Service (ACAS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the
Policy Studies Institute (PSI) in making the WERS98 data available are acknowledged. As
with other surveys in the series, the National Centre for Social Research, formally Social
Community Planning and Research (SCPR), were commissioned to conduct the survey
fieldwork on behalf of the sponsors. WERS98 is deposited with and available from The
Data Archive at Essex University. Neither the sponsors nor the Data Archive have any
responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the material contained in this paper. I
would like to thank Jos Benders, Rick Iverson, Graham Sewell, participants in the 2000
Labour Process Conference and the anonymous reviewers for Work Employment & Society,
for their comments on earlier versions of the paper.
4. Note that the WERS98 sample excludes workplaces with fewer than ten employees. It is
estimated by the WERS Data Dissemination Service (WDDS) that at the time of the survey
approximately 18 per cent of employees in Britain worked in workplaces which were not
represented by the WERS98 sample. This figure is not published and was provided to me
by Simon Kirby of the WDDS. There are not data available which allow an estimation of
the prevalence of teams in workplaces too small to be included in WERS98. Nonetheless,
there is a positive correlation between workplace size and the incidence of teams. This
suggests that that workplaces with fewer than ten employees are less likely than larger
workplaces to feature teams.
Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: an Analysis of the WERS98 Data 739
5. Thanks are due Mark Cully, formerly director of the WERS98 project team, and Simon
Kirby of the WERS Data Dissemination Service for their helpful advice on the data, for
making available SPSS syntax used in constructing the LOG and team membership
variables and the union density variable and for calculating weights to adjust results for
the effects of the multi-level design of the survey.
6. It seems likely that being a member of the largest occupational group (LOG) in a
workplace will have an impact on some of the outcomes explored in this paper. Indeed,
bivariate correlation analysis between a LOG dummy variable (1=member of LOG; 0=not
member of LOG) and the outcome variables showed weak, but statistically significant
associations (except in the case of management relations). Nonetheless, because all the
analysis is of data collected from employees who were members of the LOG, this factor is
controlled for and should not confound the analysis.
7. Consideration was given to limiting team membership only to those who worked in teams
which had all the characteristics of a self-managing team. This would, however, have
restricted team membership to only 6.2 per cent of the sub sample of members and non-
members and reduced the sub sample to only 1847 cases. Both the size of the sub sample
and the highly skewed distribution of the dichotomous variable would have caused
statistical problems in subsequent multivariate analysis.
8. A number of these items are based on analysis in Ramsay et al. (2000).
9. In the interests of saving space details of construction of the intervening variables are not
included, but can be provided upon request.
10. Because by far the majority of employees were on permanent contracts, a single
employment status dummy was included whereby a value of 1 was assigned to permanent
status and 0 to fixed term or temporary employment status. ‘Other’ was used as the
reference category for occupation. The design effects of the multi-level survey design were
controlled for by recalculating significance levels using ‘deft’ weights provided by the
WDDS. Details of the implications of the multi-level design, and techniques for dealing
with them, can be found in NIESR (2000: 28–36).
11. It should be noted that managerial employees are excluded from this analysis and that the
best predictor of discretion found in Harley (1999) using the AWIRS95 dataset was being a
manager.
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Department of Management
University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010 Victoria
Australia
Accepted February 2001 email: [email protected]
742 bill harley