At the end of a survey about the transition to team-based organization at five British steel plants, the authors included the typical request for additional comments. Business professors Nicolas Bacon and Paul Blyton analyzed the nearly 300 thoughts volunteered about "teamworking."
"The majority of employees across these plants supported teamworking and realized it many prolong the survival of their plant…" the authors say. But almost all of the comments indicated a belief that managers had imposed teamworking for reasons other than helping the workers or company. To summarize, the authors write, "senior managers were seen to have introduced teamworking using the following rationale: in order to meet the concerns of shareholders the company embarked on a programme of job cuts; the careers of managers would benefit from delivering this programme and teamworking offered a popular recipe; when implementing teamworking alongside a job-cutting programme managers found it necessary to protect their own jobs; in order to secure the compliance of supervisors and team leaders (or other senior employees on the shopfloor) employees were selected for promotion who would accept and support the teamworking initiative."
The majority of commenters suggested political reasons for the change, as suggested by these quotations:
The theme of "us vs. them" showed up repeatedly. Among economic explanations by the workers were these:
Almost as common was the belief that job cuts were the hidden agenda: "Teamwork in theory is sound business sense and most people would agree in (the commenter's plant). The original worry was that teamwork…was designed as a vehicle for job reduction. This fear was denied…but has proved to be correct."
A hint on the way around this suspicion appears in the different results between most of the plants and the one in which managers' careers were not considered as strong of a motive. The authors write, "The future survival of the Shotten plant was in question at the time of the research…" Also, "the year before the survey the number of middle managers had fallen with technical and laboratory work subcontracted to other companies." In other words, employees knew the economic realities of the plant, and had seen managers hurt equally with workers in previous cuts.
The authors point out that elsewhere in the survey workers reported an increase in skills and greater variety of work, "and commented on some (surveys) in a very positive fashion; however, they simply did not attribute them to management. It appears that management are easily blamed for the negative aspects of teamworking and not easily credited for the positive elements." They also note the tendency for free comments to be negative, but point to the consistency of the themes and earlier studies as evidence those comments reflect a much wider perception.
Source: Bacon, N., and P. Blyton (05), "Worker Responses to Teamworking: Exploring Employee Attributions of Managerial Motives," International Journal of Human Resource Management 16(2):238.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.