Teamwork and high performance work organisation
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Introduction
This study maps the issue of teamwork, as covered by research into working conditions in European countries. First, the report briefly outlines how teamwork has developed and tries to take into account both the national context of individual countries and the context at company level in these countries. It thus addresses how teamwork has been incorporated into companies’ overall organisational strategy. Teamwork in this case is regarded merely as one element of the new forms of work organisation and as an important component of ‘high performance work organisation’ (HPWO).
The study then focuses on certain specific aspects of teamwork. Besides looking at the overall incidence of this type of work organisation in different European countries, the study examines the prevalence of specific forms of teamwork. It considers whether teamwork helps to give workers greater autonomy and higher job satisfaction. Moreover, it ascertains whether the presence of teamwork influences the learning environment in an enterprise. Attention is also paid to the possible negative impacts of teamwork, such as higher work intensity and work overload.
The study draws from the contributions of 16 national correspondents reporting to the European Working Condition Observatory (EWCO) . The national reports are also available: Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The information on quantitative and qualitative research from the national correspondents is combined with statistical analysis of data from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) of 2000/2001, which makes it possible to compare the individual participating countries. The third EWCS, from 2000, provides data for the EU15 countries, and the same survey was applied to the 10 new Member States (NMS) and Bulgaria and Romania in 2001, while they were all still acceding and candidate countries (ACC12) for membership to the European Union.
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