Capacity for Teamwork and Self-Selection in Recruitment

Working on the project:

Agnes Stribeck

Description:

Recently, teamwork has become ever more important as a means for increasing productivity in organizations. This influx of teamwork was accompanied by the - by now almost omnipresent - requirement of capacity for teamwork in German job advertisements. It seems reasonable that employers require capacity for teamwork in job advertisements to achieve self-selection of potential employees based on capacity for teamwork. However, potential applicants could also associate the requirement of capacity for teamwork with a future job marked by teamwork, which might prevent high qualified workers from applying.
In this research project we apply an extension of a model of self-selection by GROSSMANN (2004) to the sorting decision between working individually and working in a team. In an experiment and a survey, we are able to show that, supporting our theoretical results, higher qualified workers are indeed less likely to choose teamwork. We also look at other personal characteristics and task type as determinants of this sorting decision. Practical implications are that employers could face problems when trying to recruit the best employees for teamwork and that some tasks are more attractive as team tasks than others. Employers should therefore only implement teamwork when necessary and only for certain task types. Furthermore, a good reputation for recruiting high qualified employees should also induce other high qualified workers to apply for a job.

Publications:

• Stribeck, Agnes, Kerstin Pull (2010): Self-Selection into Teamwork: A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis. SSRN-Working Paper Nr. 1619292.