Working better together? Empowerment, panopticon and conflict approaches to teamwork

Abstract

Scholars often offer competing accounts of the consequences of workplace teams. Researchers in the empowerment tradition describe autonomy in teams as generating satisfaction and pro-social behaviors. The panopticon approach emphasizes the disciplinary aspect of teamwork – arguing that peer monitoring elicits intense effort and discourages resistance through visibility and normative control. The conflict school highlights variation in experiences of and responses to teamwork, calling particular attention to worker resistance. This study uses mixed methods to investigate these perspectives simultaneously, analyzing content-coded data on 204 work groups. Though evidence supports both empowerment and panopticon theories, especially when used in combination, the conflict perspective emerges as pivotal to understanding not only worker resistance but also consent to empowerment and even panoptic control.