Team turnover: direct and indirect effects on team performance and effectiveness over time

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonEmployee turnover is a major topic of research in organisational behaviour and human resource management. Particularly for health care organisations, employee turnover is a major concern because it produces shortages and unstable staffing, which consequently leads to increases in work demands, which can threaten well-being, job satisfaction and behavioural commitment of individual nurses and consequently the quality of care. High turnover at the collective team level has been considered to be more complex and significant than individual level turnover because of its negative impact on organisational performance and quality of patient care. The study of the consequences of turnover on organisational outcomes over time is important and it has begun to address at the collective level to understand the direct causal effects. However, few have investigated the underlying reasons for the negative effects of team turnover on organisational outcomes. Team turnover has been shown to disrupt normal operation of firms by weakening human resources, loosening social ties among members, and interrupting cooperation and change in assigned duties and responsibilities. There is a critical need to examine the theoretical mechanisms and boundary conditions that drive the effects of team turnover on team outcomes over time. Turnover research is limited in explaining turnover processes and outcomes at team level of analysis over time. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of team turnover on team performance and team effectiveness outcomes over time by considering the mediating role of team trust, cooperative behaviours, monitoring behaviours and the moderating effect of team cohesion and team support. A model formulated around input-process-output (IPO) was developed, based on operational disruption theory, to test the direct and indirect effects of team turnover on outcomes using four waves of data collected over nine months from 827 nurses nested within 75 teams in two health care organisations, whereas team performance was assessed by supervisor ratings and team effectiveness was assessed by team member ratings. The findings of structural equation modelling showed a direct negative effect of team turnover on team performance and team satisfaction and indirect negative effects of team turnover on team performance, team satisfaction and team commitment. The result showed that team cohesion partially moderated the effect between team turnover and team performance and team satisfaction. Team trust, cooperative behaviour and monitoring behaviour act as multiple meditating roles between team turnover and team performance and effectiveness. The result showed that: (1) team trust fully mediated the effect of team turnover on cooperating behaviour and monitoring behaviour; (2) cooperative behaviour fully mediated the effect of team trust on team performance; and (3) monitoring behaviour fully mediated the effect of team trust on team commitment. The IPO model supported the research hypotheses that team turnover has a negative effect on key interaction processes and that these disruptions negatively influence team performance and team commitment. These findings contribute to further our understanding about team turnover and about the underlying relations between team turnover, processes and outcomes within teams. The findings of this study provide healthcare human resource managers and policy makers with a better understanding of how team turnover effects team performance and effectiveness through trust, cooperative behaviours and monitoring behaviours, as well as cohesion in teams assisting in dealing with negative implications of team turnover. The results of this study also offer advice that can help to implement intervention strategies to retain health care team members by supporting their teams that need to cope with operational disruptions such as human capital resources loss and social capital loss that associate with team turnover.Strengths and limitations of the study are outlined and the directions for future research are highlighted