CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1   BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Considering its prominent place in the prevailing organizational discourse, shared responsibility has proven to be a favorite formula for organizationalredesign. It is a promising concept which offers autonomy, responsibility andjob enrichment in order to meet the aspirations of the employees. At the sametime, shared responsibility is believed to enhance performance outcomes such asproductivity and quality, on both the team and the organization level. Hence,management fashions such as business process re-engineering, leanproduction, the modern socio-technical approach and human resourcesmanagement (HRM), all embrace the core principles of shared responsibility (Benders and Van Hootegem, 1999; de Sitter et al., 1997; Kuipers and vanAmelsvoort, 1990).

A major argument for introducing and for developing shared responsibility in an organization stems from recent insights into the impact of human resources onorganizational performance and productivity. In the current debate on HRM, the resource-based view of the firm states that the intangible, imperfectly imitable andimperfectly substitutable internal resources of the organization enable a firm to generate and to sustain its competitive advantage (DoorewaardandMeihuizen,2000). This statement is true especially with regard to the impact of humanresources on organizational performance and productivity in organizations that practices shared responsibility. Shared responsibility encourages team-based work. The performance in team-based working largely depends on the employees’competencies and attitudes with regard to planning, performing andcontrolling team tasks in an autonomousway.

When analyzing which features of shared responsibility at work can add to the enhancement of team performance which can only be achieved with team work i.e. the division of jobregulation tasks between team leader and team members. A larger allocation ofjob regulation tasks within the team among the team members is supposed tocontribute more effectively to organizational goals than the allocation of thesetasks to a separate team leader. However, hardly any empirical evidence existsregarding the relationship between shared responsibility structure and shared performance (Benders et al., 1999). This study is aimed at clarifying the impact of the structure of sharedresponsibilities on workers’ productivity considering its current challenges.