Work Group Effort and Rewards: The Roles of Organizational and Social Power as Context

Self-managing teams have a history of mixed effects for the employees involved. Organizational contexts reflecting different constellations of power may be useful for understanding these different outcomes. We theorize two different organizational man-dates (management-initiated versus craft) and three social contexts (union presence, abu-sive management, and minority concentration) that may be consequential for work group outcomes. Content analysis of the population of workplace ethnographies (N = 204) pro-vides data with a combination of organizational variability and rich in-depth descriptions of work group outcomes useful for evaluating these expectations. Union environments are found to be essential for the most positive team outcomes. Minority concentrated work groups benefit especially from the craft organization of work. And management abuse dramatically undercuts any positive consequences of management-initiated teams for employees. We conclude with a discussion of the centrality of power for understand-ing work group outcomes, an insight useful for resolving ongoing debates in the field about the conditions that underwrite success or failure of team arrangements