The Relationship between Teamwork Practices with Employees Job Satisfaction: A Study at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) Ahmad Binti Nurbarirah Afrah Hayati Abdul Rahman Khalijah Mohd Nor Siti Rosnita Binti Sakarji Syamimi Binti Samsudin Wan Aisyah Amni Wan Mohamad Saferdin University Teknologi Mara, Cawangan Melaka, Malaysia Abstract Most of the organization nowadays practices the team working style to achieve their objective in the company Sometimes it is look like a trend toward the company who practice the teamwork style When employee working in a team, they will produce a quality product and services and also effect the employee job satisfaction That is why working in team nowadays becomes an important and interesting practice toward organization The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between the characteristics of the teamwork with employee job satisfaction This research is focuses on the relationship of practicing working in team in organization toward employee job satisfaction at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) The objective of this study is to identify the relationship between the teamwork that plays a role to achieve the employee job satisfaction The sample of this study consisted of 80 staff from ALAM that come from every department with different background in term of education, ages, gender and working experiences The primary data is collected from questionnaires that were distributed to the employee who has been choosing randomly Literature review supported the relationship between diversity and communication among team toward job satisfaction Keywords: Job Satisfaction; Teamwork; Communication; Diversity Introduction Background of Study Teamwork is an increasingly popular way of achieving greater organizational flexibility, as well as other benefits such as reduced costs of supervision, faster lead time, innovation, more effective decision-making, better customer service, and enhanced employee morale Most investment and financial advisory companies have reorganized employees into teams to serve clients better and make better investment This trend toward teamwork is, in fact, increasingly common in many industries More than half of the U.S organizations polled in one survey use teams to a high or very high extent to conduct their day-to-day business In Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM), working in a team is often practiced especially among (four) departments which are Corporate Planning & Business Development Department (CPBD), Registry Department, Student Affairs 204 Department (SAFD) and Director Training & Education Department (DTE) In this study, the arrangement of an outsider registers for doing a course at ALAM has been chosen to show how these four departments work together to ensure their customers enjoyed themselves throughout their training at ALAM According to Rico, Hera & Tabernero (2011) over the last forty years, teams have come to be considered as a central element in the functioning of organizations Teamwork has also been applied in doing a research especially scientific research A study of almost 20 million research publications reported that the percentage of journal articles written by teams rather than individuals has increased substantially over the past five decades According to Benrazavi, Seyed Rahim & et.al (2013), teamwork is also known as a motive of job satisfaction as almost all work on job satisfaction and team performance matters To achieve employee job satisfaction when working in a team is very hard to accomplish The members within the team have their individual factors to gain job satisfaction which includes the reward when the job is completed, the communication between team members and leader, size of the team and duration for the task to be completed Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the issue of the relationship between the characteristics of teamwork and employee job satisfaction Statement of the Problem Working in a team contributes many benefits towards the organizations success such as reduced costs of supervision, faster lead time, innovation, more effective decision-making and better customer service Teams are not always effective as for individuals who love working alone When working in a team, the task or project given can be done more effectively and with better quality The burden of an individual responsibility is also reduced because the tasks are divided into small portions A team is built to complete a mission and task Not every people like to work in a team People join a team only to fulfill their personal needs Individual factors and communication can be some of the factors that prevent from teamwork to be developed into an organization There are some people who only prefer to work with the same gender, the same generation, the same education or the position, the same department and many more According to Sammartino, (2002), the challenge for business is manage diverse teams effectively so as to harness the potential performance These factors bring the issue of why working in a team sometimes could not fulfill employee job satisfaction He also adds that diverse teams have the potential to outperform homogenous teams When an employee fails to receive job satisfaction, the teamwork concept to complete a mission cannot be achieved This is because there is no cooperation and understanding among the team members Communication is an important part for people to start a conversation According to Hassal (2009), communication is assumed to be central to the successful performance of team As a team, each member needs to communicate with each other to make sure the information will be received clearly Otherwise, the job satisfaction of each employee will be absent How does communication between team members have an effect on employee job satisfaction? Effective communication can help employees to decrease their morale problem and will ensure they are satisfied that they are in the loop and part of them However, a lack of communication can cause confusion between team members Poor communication skills create business problems such as team communication issues and people problem, losing the trust of co-workers and cooperation of team members All this issue can bring dissatisfaction Hassal also stated that communication sometimes not related to team performance Therefore, this research paper will identify the problem of communication towards employee job satisfaction Consequently, this study is conducted to identify which characteristics of teamwork give the most effect toward employee job satisfaction among Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) staff Research Objective This study focuses on the relationship between the characteristics of teamwork and employee job satisfaction There are several objectives, which need to be taken into consideration in carrying out this study All these objectives are mentioned as follows: 205 To investigate the level of job satisfaction among employee at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) To identify the relationship between team member diversity and employee job satisfaction To identify the relationship between communication in team and employee job satisfaction Research Question What is the level of job satisfaction in Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM)? Is there any relationship between team member diversity and employee job satisfaction at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM)? Is there any relationship between communication in team and employee job satisfaction at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM)? Literature Review The main purpose of writing a literature review is to convey the readers what knowledge and ideas have been established with regards to the research topic on the effects of working in a team with employee job satisfaction Relationship between Independent Variable and Dependent Variable Relationship between Communication and Job Satisfaction: The process of communication must happen between sender and receiver by which the process starts with the sender who initiates a message by encoding a thought, and this message is the actual physical product from the senders encoding According to Steingrimsdottir (2011), both internal communication and job satisfaction are related to each other Poor information flow can maintain acceptable job satisfaction but interpersonal communication factors have much greater effect on how satisfied the employees are Relationship between Team’s Diversity and Job Satisfaction: Employee job satisfaction and cultural diversity are very important in the workplace Ethnic diversity can often enhance or reduce employee job satisfaction (Piraglia, 2015) People’s degree of overall job satisfaction or their degree of satisfaction with a specific element of their job could be affected by their experience, including their gender, race, or ethnicity Evidence of this would be the legitimate studies that did find a correlation between job satisfaction and diversity Characteristics of Teamwork i ii Employee Job Satisfaction Team Member Diversity Communication Among Team Member (Independent Variable) (Dependent Variable) Figure: 2.1 Conceptual Framework for Relationship between Characteristics of Teamwork and Employee Job Satisfaction Figure above show the dependent and independent variable of the study on the relationship between teamwork and employee job satisfaction The paper will study on the two characteristics of teamwork which is the team member diversity and communication among team member toward employee job satisfaction 206 Methodology In this study, a research on the relationship between characteristic of teamwork and employee job satisfaction are conducted in Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) There are populations of approximately 107 staff in the organization Krejcie and Morgan’s sample size table was used as a reference to determine the suitable sample size for the population The 80 respondents were suggested as a sample size Therefore, 80 respondents will be selected at the Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) as the sample size to answer the questionnaire The equation of the sample size will be n=80 Data Collection Method The questionnaire will be administered to 80 staff at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) This, refer to the primary resources of data that will be used in this study The sample will give a period at least one day to complete the survey If researcher distributes the survey at 0800hrs then it will be collected at 1700hrs The time taken to complete all 80 surveys is almost two weeks because some of staff sometime takes time till days to complete the questionnaire The reason is they are too busy to complete their task before they spend their free time to answer the questionnaire Finding & Discussion In this chapter, the discussion will display the result or findings and analysis of the study on The Relationship between Teamwork Practices toward Employee Job Satisfaction in an Organization at Akademi Laut Malaysia, Melaka (ALAM) The data was analyzed by using SPSS Statistics 20.0 All of 80 questionnaires were distributed toward all 80 samples This chapter will focus on the finding of the research data that has been analyzed which shows the results of respondents’ profile, descriptive statistics, reliability test and correlational of the variable The dependent variable of the study is employee job satisfaction while the first independent variable of the study was teamwork diversity which consists of gender, education and age and the second independent variable was communication Furthermore, the findings will help to answer the research question and also want to achieve the objective of this study Research Question 1: What is the level of job satisfaction in Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM)? In order to measure the level of job satisfaction, mean and standard deviation is used to measure the level of job satisfaction through likert scale that consist of agreement level from strongly disagree to strongly agree This RQ1 is to find the level of job satisfaction among employees in ALAM Based on the result, it can be indicated that majority of the respondents were happy working in their department with the highest mean 4.05 and standard deviation 825 (m=4.05, std.dev= 825) They also claimed that they love their job very much with the result (m=4.01, std.dev= 755) The result indicates that majority of the employee show that they are satisfied working with the organization Research Question 2: Is there any relationship between team member diversity and employee job satisfaction at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM)? The study found that there is a positive relationship between team diversity and job satisfaction at Akademi Laut Malaysia (ALAM) The correlation of team diversity shows that the r value (r = 488) The range between 0.4 and 0.5 said as a moderate relationship Besides that, the p value show that it was 000 that is equal to p