Teamwork in the Public Cage: Antecedents of Self-Management of Teams in Public Organizations

Abstract

Whereas the organizational concept of self-managed teams has received abundant attention by public management scholars as a post-bureaucratic answer to the increasing demands faced by public organizations, research on what teamwork in public organizations actually looks like is lacking. This paper fills this gap by investigating to what extent characteristics of teamwork commonly found in research on private sector organizations - goal dependency, task dependency and external cooperation - affect the degree of self-management of teams in public sector organizations. Furthermore, we examine how self-managed teams are affected by their attachment to public values by analyzing publicness as a moderator of the relationships of goal dependency, task dependency and external cooperation with self-management. Analyses of supervisor and team member data from a sample of 68 teams in Dutch public sector organizations show that goal dependency and external cooperation positively affect the degree of self-management, while task dependency does not. Moderated multiple regression analysis also shows that publicness bounds the positive association between goal dependency and self-management, but does not significantly affect the relationship of external cooperation with self-management.