The Effects of Self-Managed and Closely-Managed Teams on Labor Productivity and Product Quality: An Empirical Analysis of a Cross Section of Establishments

Jed DeVaro ()

Labor and Demography from EconWPA

Abstract: I estimate the effect of team production on labor productivity and product quality using a cross section of British establishments. A distinguishing feature of this study is its use of a structural model that treats as endogenous the organizations’ choices of teams and whether or not to grant autonomy to team members. One of the main findings is that the typical establishment enjoys statistically significant increases in labor productivity (but not product quality) from using teams, though there is no statistically significant difference between the predicted gains from autonomous versus non- autonomous teams. I show that standard methodological approaches that treat teams and autonomy as exogenous induce biases of two forms: 1) the benefits from teams are inflated, 2) the benefits of autonomous teams relative to those of non-autonomous teams are inflated. Both biases are particularly severe in the case of product quality.

Keywords: teams; autonomy; labor productivity; product quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
Date: 2005-10-05
Note: Type of Document - doc; pages: 57
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/lab/papers/0510/0510002.doc (application/msword)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpla:0510002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Labor and Demography from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().