• Alex Savin
• March 24, 2022
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Relations Between Workgroup Characteristics and Effectiveness

The workgroup characteristics depend on their effectiveness. Features like creativeness and independence, for example, have a very strong influence on employees’ effectiveness. Employees are paying serious attention to this relation and trying to use it to better companys’ productiveness.

Studying the Workgroup Characteristics

Five common themes were derived from the literature on effective workgroups, and then characteristics representing the themes were related to effectiveness criteria. Themes included job design, interdependence, composition, context, and process. They contained 19 group characteristics that employees and managers assessed. Effectiveness criteria included productivity, employee satisfaction, and manager judgments. One of the studies conducted by the American Psychological Association where collected data from 391 employees, 70 managers, and archival records for 80 workgroups in a financial organization. Results showed that the characteristics predicted all three effectiveness criteria, and nearly all aspects predicted some of the effectiveness criteria. The job design and process themes were slightly more predictive than the interdependence, composition, and context themes. Implications for designing effective work groups were discussed, and a 54-item measure of the 19 characteristics was presented for future research.

Previous research has demonstrated that work team characteristics can be related to effectiveness (Campion, Medsker, & Higgs, 1993). This study provides:

• A replication with professional knowledge worker jobs.
• Different measures of effectiveness.
• Work units varied in the degree to which members identified as a team.

Another study conducted in 1996 collected data from 357 employees, 93 managers, and archival records for 60 teams in a financial services organization. Team characteristics were measured with questionnaires completed by employees and managers. Effectiveness measures included immediate manager judgments at two points in time, senior and peer manager decisions, employee judgments, and archival records of employee satisfaction and performance appraisals. Results were similar to previous findings in that most team characteristics were related to most effectiveness criteria. Relationships were strongest for process characteristics, followed by job design, context, interdependence, and other features. Further, work units on single-team identity were higher on many team characteristics and effectiveness measures.

This paper investigates the relationship between a measure of workgroup characteristics and subjective and objective group performance measures. To assess the relationship between the workgroup characteristics and performance, accurate performance data and manager ratings were collected for customer service workgroups that completed the estimate. Correlational analyses provided a relationship between specific workgroup characteristics and various performance measures. In addition, a factor analysis of the measure delivered a more economical set of dimensions that were also related to the criterion measures. The results are discussed in terms of the factors related to workgroup effectiveness and their relevance to workgroups in various types of organizations.

Six hundred fifty-two employees composing 51 work teams participated in a study examining relationships among team composition (ability and personality), team process (social cohesion), and team outcomes (team viability and team performance). Mean, variance, minimum, and maximum were four scoring methods used to operationalize the team composition variables to capture the team members’ characteristics. Concerning composition variables, teams higher in general mental ability (GMA), conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and emotional stability received higher supervisor ratings for team performance. Groups higher in GMA, extraversion, and emotional stability received higher supervisor ratings for team viability. Results also show that extraversion and emotional stability were associated with team viability through social cohesion. Implications and future research needs are discussed.

Self-managing work team effectiveness is defined as high performance and employee quality of work life. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives, including work design, self-leadership, sociotechnical, and participative management, four variables are theorized to predict self-managing work team effectiveness: group task design, encouraging supervisor behaviors, group characteristics, and employee involvement context. Data is collected from both a set of self-managing and traditionally managed teams from a large telephone company and the model is tested with structural equations modeling. Support is found for hypotheses concerning group task design, group characteristics, and employee involvement context, but not encouraging supervisory behaviors.

In this study, the authors investigated the relationship between work team effectiveness and two distinct aspects of the personality composition of teams: (a) the average level of a given trait within a team referred to as team personality elevation (TPE), and (b) the variability or differences in personality traits found within a team, or team personality diversity (TPD). Retail assistants (N = 328) working in 82 teams were assessed on a broad range of traits organized around the Big Five personality factors framework. Across the set of Big Five traits, TPE and TPD predicted unique variance in ratings of team job performance. For each specific trait of the Big Five, either TPE or TPD predicted team performance. TPE was positively related to team performance for conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience; TPD of extraversion and emotional stability was positively associated with team performance.

Conclusion

It is in the greatest interest of employers to find that magic formula of choosing the best employees and group them to reach greater effectiveness. The best characteristics combined lead to greater productiveness and, that way, higher income for the company. This is the thing which will be researched even more in the future.