Padang — Work culture has been found to play a stronger role than teamwork in driving employee motivation and performance at PT PLN (Persero) UPT Padang. This finding was revealed in a study conducted by Rival Sonjaya and Eka Fauzihardani from Universitas Negeri Padang, published in 2026 in the East Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (EAJMR). The study highlights that success in public utility companies depends not only on technical systems but also on organizational culture shaping employee behavior.
In the electricity sector, employee performance directly affects operational reliability, asset maintenance, and service continuity. Internal data from PLN UPT Padang showed fluctuating transmission disturbances over the past five years, decreasing from 173 cases in 2020 to 59 in 2022 before rising again to 104 cases in 2024. This indicates that operational consistency remains a challenge.
The researchers examined teamwork and work culture, and how these factors influence employee performance through work motivation as a mediating variable.
The study involved all 190 employees at PT PLN UPT Padang using a quantitative survey approach with Likert-scale questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS 4. Most respondents were male (93%), and the majority were aged 26–35 years (71%), representing the productive workforce group.
Initial findings showed that employee performance, motivation, teamwork, and work culture were all categorized as low. Employee performance scored 3.19, teamwork 3.10, work culture 3.06, and motivation only 2.88. This indicates significant room for improvement.
One surprising finding was that teamwork had no significant effect on employee motivation. In PLN’s operational environment, teamwork appears to function as a procedural necessity rather than an emotional or motivational factor.
On the other hand, work culture showed a strong and significant effect on motivation, with a T-statistic of 7.918 and p-value of 0.000. This means that discipline, responsibility, safety awareness, and compliance with procedures significantly strengthen employees’ motivation.
Interestingly, work motivation itself did not directly influence employee performance. According to Rival Sonjaya, this suggests that technical industries like electricity transmission involve many other factors, such as competence, equipment readiness, workload, and organizational systems.
However, work motivation was found to mediate the relationship between work culture and employee performance. This means a healthy organizational culture can build stronger motivation, which eventually improves employee outcomes.
The findings send a strong message to public utility organizations: improving performance requires more than strengthening teamwork. Building a strong, consistent, and meaningful work culture is equally, if not more, important.
For public services, a positive work culture can improve service quality, speed of disturbance response, and electricity distribution reliability. In a sector where stability is critical, organizational behavior becomes just as important as technical infrastructure.
This study provides new insights into human resource management, showing that in technical organizations, work culture may have a more measurable impact than teamwork in shaping employee performance.
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