Are We Collaborating Yet? Employee Assessment of Peer’s Perceptions

Abstract

Employers rarely utilise their employees’ capacity to assess the collegiality and productivity of their own work unit, yet they are determinants of employee retention and profitability. One reason is the lack of a reliable, valid survey instrument to measure collaboration viability (CoVi), which we postulate is the construct that employees use to implicitly assess their work unit. Inherent weaknesses of own-perception and peer-assessment instruments prevent them reliably measuring CoVi. A novel method overcoming respective deficiencies by combining the strengths of both approaches is proposed that we term peer’s-perception. It is contended that such an instrument may be improved through formulation in accordance with a universal model of collaboration. The model chosen is PILAR as it encapsulates a variety of social and organisational psychology theories. Prospects, involved, liked, agency and respect constitute five Pillars of collaboration (Heslop, Bailey, et al., 2017). Based on this review, we propose a peer’s-perception instrument (Pillar-PP) and that this instrument be formally evaluated.