Production Teamworking: The Importance of Interdependence and Autonomy for Employee Strain and Satisfaction

A UK manufacturer introduced a common model of teamworking which achieved quite different performance results in wire-mills and roperies. Survey data (n = 231) showed higher job-related strain and lower job satisfaction in the wire-mills, where teamworking was not a success. Findings indicated that the differences in employee well-being could be accounted for by contrasting levels of process inter-dependence in the two production areas. Teamworking was a success in the roperies where process interdependence was high, but not in the wire-mills where there was a mismatch between this production process characteristic and a team-based form of work organization. Interactions between interdependence and autonomy were also found, such that higher autonomy had a positive impact only for those working in low interdependence processes. The unintended consequence of teamworking under low interdependence is to create winners and losers, as individual team-members take on responsibilities of the team as a whole.