Are We Collaborating Yet? Employee Assessment of Peer’s Perceptions

Abstract

Employers rarely utilise their employees" capacity to assess the collegiality and productivity of their own work unit, yet they are determinants of employee retention and profitability. One reason is the lack of a reliable, valid survey instrument to measure collaboration viability (CoVi), which we postulate is the construct that employees use to implicitly assess their work unit. Inherent weaknesses of own-perception and peer-assessment instruments prevent them reliably measuring CoVi. A novel method overcoming respective deficiencies by combining the strengths of both approaches is proposed that we term peer"s-perception. It is contended that such an instrument may be improved through formulation in accordance with a universal model of collaboration. The model chosen is PILAR as it encapsulates a variety of social and organisational psychology theories. Prospects, involved, liked, agency and respect constitute five Pillars of collaboration . Based on this review, we propose a peer"s-perception instrument (Pillar-PP) and that this instrument be formally evaluated.Keywords: productivity, psychological safety, cohesion, collaboration, peer"s-perception, PILAR Measuring Collaboration ViabilityCollaboration is a synergistic, voluntary combining of individual contributions for a collective goal (Hughes & Jones, 2011;Thomas et al., 2007). Viability of collaboration can be threatened, such as by interpersonal conflict, poor strategy, or selfish manoeuvring (Chen, Ünal, Leung, & Xin, 2016;Topping, 2010). Collaborators are instinctively wary of such behaviours, and monitor their threat to collective success. Upon sign of collaboration unviability, the member"s first recourse is to limit their ongoing investment, such as dedicating less time or money. Once perceived risks outweigh the likelihood of success, leaving the collaboration may be the only option, knowing that doing so may cause sacrificing investments already made (Kendall & Salas, 2015).It is desirable to ameliorate threats to collaboration before members curtail their participation, or withdraw completely, since either may become a self-fulfilling prophecy (Jehn & Mannix, 2001;Morgeson & DeRue, 2006). Reasons for collaboration breakdown highlighted by the literature are free-riders, interpersonal conflict and poor leadership (Kuhn, 2015), which may be ameliorated through retraining and changes to; roles, workflow processes, oversight systems, and delegation (Daley, 1992). To ensure that failing collaboration in the workplace may be identified and repaired, the present study seeks an instrument that can reliably measure collaboration viability (CoVi).The standard method of measuring constructs reminiscent of CoVi is to survey group members for their perceptions of the group, which this article terms own-perception (Edmondson, 1999). A second approach is peer-assessment, which is rarely used to measure CoVi, but offers certain advantages over own-perception. We examine the weaknesses and ISSN 2162-3058 2017 http://ijhrs.macrothink.org 177 strengths of ...

PILAR: A Model of Collaboration to Encapsulate Social Psychology

“…Peer perception asks employees to assess their colleagues’ perceptions of the team, and is designed to overcome biases present in peer-assessment and self-perception instruments such as psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999). If such a PILAR-based instrument proves predictive of work-unit viability across cultures and organization types, it would support the universality of PILAR as a model of collaboration (Heslop, Stojanovski, Paul, & Bailey, 2017).…”

Collaboration Vouchers: A Policy to Increase Population Wellbeing

“…Conceptually, this requires two levels of confirmation-that a collaboration is legitimate and viable, rather than illegal, dysfunctional, or hollow, and that a member's participation within that collaboration is productive. Regarding the former, a five-item survey instrument (Pillar-PP) based upon PILAR asks each member to rate how each of their peer's perceives the collaboration [122]. This avoids scoring peers for their relative contribution, which may be prone to inter-rater biases resulting from personal relationships [123,124].…”

Member Perceptions as a Parsimonious Representation of Collaboration Viability

“…For instance, in other work, we have proposed an instrument exclusively based upon peer's perception, designed to measure collaboration viability. We consider that this instrument may also be used for peer assessment purposes (Heslop, Stojanovski, Paul, & Bailey, 2017). To address limitations of the first study, we now compare its findings with those of a highly-cited (114 citations) study that employs a similar, factor analysis-based, method.…”

“…Not only because of changing trends in the field (Green, 2015), but also due to potential biases within CATME's original creation (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2013). We therefore contend that PILAR may offer a more parsimonious basis upon which to survey respondents' assessment of peers have of the team (Heslop et al, 2017). Indeed, if perceptions are causal to behaviour, it may be that CATME is largely measuring peer's perceptions.…”

“…Finally, since behaviours may be difficult to calibrate between respondents, to improve accuracy of a survey, training to use a behaviour-based peer assessment instrument is recommended (van Zundert, Sluijsmans, & van Merrienboer, 2010). By contrast, a perception-based instrument, if based upon familiar, universal perceptions, may not require training for respondents before use (Heslop et al, 2017).…”