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The launch of the Resource Connection website follows hard on the heels of a study called Desperately Seeking Flexibility. This presents the strongest case for flexible work in senior managerial posts yet (Flexible Working, 16 January).
Resource Connection focused a major part of its commissioned study on job sharing – a method that will play an increasingly important role in the UK workplace over the next decade.
As a result of the study, we came up with the “TAS model”, which measures the levels of personality and motivation – Thrusting, Agreeableness and Structured – in job-share partnerships.
We conducted a series of personality and motivation tests and job-sharing participants were given scores according to the model. Once we had established the combined TAS types of job-share teams, we then set about identifying whether managers judged that a particular combination outperformed others across a number of dimensions.
We discovered that there were four possible categories of matches in our job-share partnerships, all of which had a different impact on the team. They are:
- Mirrored pairs: job-share partners score the same across all three dimensions of the model, which measures the levels of personality and motivation
- Opposites: job-share partners have three different scores
- One degree of difference: job-share partners scoring the same across two areas, and differently on the remainder
- Two degrees of difference: job-share partners scoring the same on only one area, and differently on the other two.
So do pairs have to be alike to perform well? And as the differences increase between partners, does their performance deteriorate accordingly?
Overall, the greater the differences the more negative the impact on teams’ effectiveness. Interestingly, few teams chose to partner a team that was completely opposite to them.
Within “mirrored pairs”, the higher the total “thrusting” score, the lower the effectiveness score.
Having the same level of agreeablene
