Team Membership and the Experience of Work in Britain: An Analysis of the WERS98 Data

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.