Team-Related Work Attitudes

Teams have become exceedingly common features of contemporary working life. Indeed, it is rare that one encounters an organization that does not rely on some form of team-based work. Not surprisingly, therefore, the assessment of employee attitudes towards teams and teamwork has begun to attract both research and practitioner attention. Empirical team-related attitude research focusses in three general directions. Some researchers examine how individuals feel toward the overall idea of teamwork, others examine how individuals feel about specific features of teams, and still others focus on attitudes, held by team members, toward the particular team to which they belong. This chapter has three overall objectives. First, it provides an evaluative overview of the key measurement strategies that researchers have used to assess these various types of team-related attitudes and their relations with relevant variables. Second, drawing on this body of work, a nomological net describing the development, interrelations among, and consequences of these attitudes is proposed. Finally, the implications for practice that team-related work attitude research offers for organizations that use teams are discussed.