Team Working Practices and Team Orientation of Employee: A Comparative Study between the State and Private Banks in Sri Lanka

Abstract

An empirical knowledge gap was observed regarding Team Working Practices (TWP) and Team Orientation of Employee (TOE) of the selected bank branches (State Bank 1, State Bank 2, Private Bank 1 and Private Bank 2) in Sri Lanka. In general, the selected banks have formal and informal practices regarding team work and also promoting team work and team culture among their employees to flourish team orientation. Therefore, in order to fill this empirical knowledge gap, this study was conducted with three research objectives such as to explore the team working practices, level of team orientation of employee of selected state and private sector bank branches and also to investigate the differences in team orientation of employee according to the employee‟s gender, age, education, grade, working section and experience. In order to achieve the first objective of this study data were collected from the secondary sources, mainly from last four years annual reports and content analysis was applied. In this case, the unit of analysis was bank. Regarding second and third objectives primary data were collected from 115 employees of selected bank branches and the structured questionnaire was administered to collect the data. The data were analyzed by using univariate (descriptive measures such as mean and standard deviation) and cross-tabulation analyses. In this case, the unit of analysis was bank employee. In connection with first objective, findings of the study revealed that both state and private sector banks are practicing various team working practices, but relatively private sector banks have more team practices than state sector banks. In private sector, PB-1 has more team practices than PB-2. Regarding the second objective, the results of the study showed that there is a higher level of team orientation among the employees of the four banks (mean value was above 3.5) but there were slight differences observed. The mean values for the PB-1, PB-2, SB-1 and SB-2 were 4.19, 4.18, 3.94 and 3.77 respectively. Cross-tabulating of the overall level of team-orientation with gender, age, education, grade, working section and experiences of employees revealed that there are some differences regarding the third objective. Finding of the study will be useful and important in understanding empirical knowledge regarding the concepts of team working practices and team orientation of employee from the banking sector perspective.