Accounting for teamwork: a critical study of group-based systems of organizational control - Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Organizational Control

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1998  by Mahmoud Ezzamel,  Hugh Willmott

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Teamwork is currently being championed as a way of replacing inflexible, dehumanizing, bureaucratic mechanisms with more humanistic, involving, cultural-ideological methods of coordinating productive activity (Marchington, 1992; Katzenbach and Smith, 1993). It has been strongly advocated by influential management thinkers (e.g., Drucker, 1988; Peters, 1989) as well as by the advocates of total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering (BPR). Academics have identified moves toward teamwork as a prominent feature of a broader trend "in the direction of decentralised, flexible networks" that allegedly promote "a culture of expression and involvement" (Reed, 1992: 227, 229), claiming it to be "currently the most popular form of organizational restructuring" (Barker and Tompkins, 1994: 224). Teamwork forms part of a broader movement to develop lean production (Womack, Jones, and Roos, 1990) and high commitment workforces (Wood and Albanese, 1995) in which control is allegedly replaced by commitment (Walton, 1985). Even those who question the substance of claimed shifts away from traditional, modernist organizational forms (e.g., Thompson and Wallace, 1995) have concluded that teamwork is likely to remain in vogue because it is part of a trend in restructuring work.

In a recent literature review, Mueller (1994) noted the diversity of traditions in which teamwork has been featured, including self-management (e.g., Manz and Sims, 1987), sociotechnical work design (e.g., Trist, 1981), empowerment (e.g., Wellins, Byham, and Wilson, 1991), and employment flexibility (e.g., Marchington, 1992). Conspicuously absent from this review is any mention of studies conducted within a critical research tradition. These studies have shown how, especially when combined with supportive policies of recruitment and selection, teamwork practices can disempower employees by strengthening managerial control and intensifying work activity in the name of progress and the more effective management of "human resources" (e.g., Parker and Slaughter, 1988; Garrahan and Stewart, 1992). Others have voiced concerns about the coercive and potentially totalitarian features of "devotional" team culture and ideology (Barley and Kunda, 1992).

The analysis we present here of teamwork at StitchCo (a pseudonym for a major U.K.-based company) broadly confirms the assessment of those who have welcomed teamwork as a means of improving productivity and competitiveness (e.g., Tjosvold, 1991; Katzenbach and Smith, 1993). Teamwork appealed to StitchCo management when accounting calculations indicated that it could provide a cost-effective, continuously improving way of enhancing profitability by responding more rapidly to shifting market demands, competitive pressures, and business opportunities. Like authors of many other analyses of teamwork, we also pay attention to its psychosocial and cultural-ideological dimensions. But instead of viewing teamwork as a slicker means of work coordination that promises to "re-align individual motivation with organizational rationality" (Mueller, 1994: 386), we show how its introduction at StitchCo was embedded in a political economy of work organization. While appearing to deliver universal benefits, teamwork can conceal or dissemble a variety of unsavory features of work reorganization, including coercion masquerading as empowerment and the camouflaging of managerial expediency in the rhetorics of "clannism" and humanization (Knights and Willmott, 1987; Sinclair, 1992). When acknowledged in mainstream commentaries on teamwork, these features tend to be attributed to managers' failure to "manage the context" effectively (Jenkins, 1994). Even when there is an appreciation of the contingencies that shape teamwork in different cultural and organizational settings (e.g., Mueller, 1994), no connection is made between the difficulties encountered in realizing the ideals of teamwork (e.g., self-management, high problem-solving capability, etc.) and pressures to maintain or increase corporate profitability that invariably compromise these ideals (Danford, 1997). Moreover, critics of teamwork, such as Sinclair (1992), rarely support their claims with detailed empirical analysis. In this paper, we combine a critique of mainstream conceptualizations of teamwork with a detailed empirical study of its introduction, including the use of accounting calculations to justify and control teamwork as a way of contributing to a restoration of corporate profitability with the minimum of capital investment.

Our study contributes to a small but growing number of critical, in-depth studies of teamwork (e.g., Barker, 1993; Pollert, 1996; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Marks et al., 1997; Danford, 1997) by building on and illustrating a comparatively well-established critique in a way that incorporates two sparsely researched aspects of its practical organization. The critique contends that exhortations to "take collective responsibility" are a feature of teamwork but that their practical realization may well be impeded when teamwork is adopted as an extension of and supplement to a traditional management system. The intent to abolish some features of this system, such as close supervision, should not be uncritically conflated with a dilution or demise of an established top-down structure of control. From a critical perspective, it is understood that team-based work organization neither eliminates "the control imperative," nor does it "smother worker dissent and resistance" (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996: 289). While we acknowledge that teamwork can deliver managerially desired, cost-effective outcomes, as it did at StitchCo, we challenge the claim of those commentators, including critical analysts (e.g., Barker, 1993), who have claimed that teamwork involves a significant shift from a traditional management system (Womack, Jones, and Roos, 1990). We extend this critique in two ways. First, we highlight the role of accounting calculations in justifying the introduction of teamwork and supporting its day-to-day operation, a topic generally neglected by sociologists of organization (but see Meyer, 1986; Zald, 1986). Our examination of the use of accounting measures in establishing and sustaining teamwork contributes to a small but growing body of research undertaken by accounting academics that explores how accounting is implicated in processes of organizational change (e.g., Hopwood, 1990; Ezzamel, 1994; Jones and Dugdale, 1995). Second, and of greater theoretical importance, we address the issue of how employees' sense of self-identity renders them more or less receptive to moves in the direction of teamwork. While some studies have suggested the significance of self-identity for facilitating management control or stimulating employee resistance (e.g., Kerfoot and Knights, 1992; Barker, 1993), it has not been a focus of analysis.