Conclusions
It appears, from this special issue, that three factors are becoming increasingly
prominent in teams and teamwork research; customer service, virtuality and diversity.
The focus being whether teamwork models can be transferred or adapted to service
based industries.
In a review of interdisciplinary perspectives on the organisation of work, Batt and
Doellgast (2004) argue that the way to develop more inclusive and coherent
understandings of teamwork is to increase awareness and learning across disciplines
and theoretical traditions. The papers within this collection are varied in coming from
both labour process oriented accounts (Ryan, Valsecchi et al., and Richards et al.), social
psychology (Au and Marks) and more mainstream psychological/managerialist
positions (Hagemann et al., and Rolfsen and Langeland). Most of these papers were
developed and informed by discussion between each other and between disciplines.
Batt and Doellgast (2004) suggested that psychological researchers would benefit from
the scepticism found in the critical literature on teams, and that the critical literature
would benefit from input from psychologists who are trained at defining and
measuring central concepts more precisely and such an exchange between disciplines
has strengthened the contributions within this special issue.
What we can see in particular, is where disciplines have started to overlap is in the
use of broader frameworks to examine dimensions of teamwork, specifically
Thompson and Wallace’s (1996) discussion of the technical, governance and normative
components of teamwork. This framework includes the clarity of definition of central
concepts from a psychological tradition, particularly in discussions about team
competencies, yet acknowledges the impact of context on the organisation and
the experience of work from a more sociologically informed view (Batt and
Doellgast, 2004).
Finally, we would like to thank you for reading this special issue of Employee
Relations (and of course the contributors to this edition) and hope it becomes a useful
contribution to the contemporary teamwork debate.