THE IMPACT OF TEAMWORK QUALITY IN UNIVERSITY ORGANIZATIONAL ROUTINES TO REACH BEST RESULTS

The effectiveness of the educational processes depend mainly on the ability to properly coordinate different agents in the sharing of ideas, knowledge, objectives and respecting one to each other. Therefore, the improvement of these systems should be based in the putting into practice of proper organizational routines to reach the desired objectives. To this respect, De Pablos et al. (2013) indicate that different practices developed in the University organizational systems can determine the success and the reaching of objectives in upper education.

The importance of organizational routines makes the researchers to pose the following research question; Does teamwork quality (conceptualized as relational coordination) promote the implementation of organizational routines for improving the quality of educational systems?
Therefore, the main objective of this research is to proof if the teamwork quality (Gittell 2009, 2011) amongst different members at the University lecturers explains better results in the University systems

First, we explore the organizational factors that influence the implementation of organizational routines.
Second, given the emerging focus on theory based explanation of implementation of organizational routines, current research is aimed at developing a theory based on the relationship between the selected organizational factors and the implementation of organizational routines.
Third it is empirically tested the relationship between the selected organizational factors and the implementation of organizational routines.

The researchers examine the teamwork as the main organizational factor.
Teamwork has emerged as a contemporary management technique, the no adoption of which has been considered as a cause of failure to implement change initiatives in healthcare organizations (Ramanujam and Rousseau, 2006). Teamwork is important for promoting action on research implementation in health systems (Rycroft-Malone, 2004; Damschroder and Hagedorn, 2011). In Organizational behavior literature, there is much emphasis on collaborative teamwork, but a relationship between teamwork and organizational success is lacking. So, studying teamwork in relation to the implementation of organizational routines to improve results in Educational Systems is needed. Studying this relationship is important because many practices for improving educational systems cannot be used without a collaborative teamwork.

We have applied the relational coordination model to measure teamwork to a representative sample of lecturers in Spanish Universities and in this paper we present the results. We try to validate if those universities showing higher degrees in teamwork quality are the ones who have developed more efficient organizational routines in the teaching learning processes. Given the importance of interactions among educational professionals (Gittell, Seidner and Wimbush, 2010), the model of relational coordination is well positioned to address teamwork quality in education organizational. This model has been successfully applied in many healthcare settings (Gittell, Seidner and Wimbush, 2010, Haider, 2013), and in education too (de Pablos-Heredero et al., 2012; 2013). However, to the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first research applying relational coordination model in the context of organizational routines implementation.