I’ve
been really impressed with the quality of the comments and the constructive
debate that was sparked by my last post on Fighting
the War for Talent Right. As I went
back and read the post and the smart comments, I realized that I had
unwittingly implied a dangerous half-truth: That doing things in a tight team
is just always better than having them done by a collection of individuals who throw their work into some kind of common “pot,” but don’t interact much.
Sociologists talk about this as the difference between a group with strong
“interdependence” versus one that has little or none at all.
If
you look at research on teams by social psychologists and organizational
researchers it turns out that Freud got it right about 100 years ago: Groups
bring out the best and worst in human beings. One my mentors is J.Richard Hackman, who has spent about 40 years studying
what drives group effectiveness. I
worked on a team effectiveness project that Richard led in graduate school,
that resulted in a book he edited called
Groups That Work, and for a complete and more recent summary of his
perspective see his Leading
Teams. About 10 years ago, I recall
Richard expressing annoyance because the then best-seller
The Wisdom of Teams was being used as a justification for herding people
into tight-knit teams, on theory that teams outperform individuals.
It
turns out that if you look at team effectiveness research, the lesson is that if you can get the
conditions right, teams will outperform a loss collection of individuals on a wide range of tasks. But
there is also striking evidence that a bad team will bring out the worst in
people as well, and if you can’t get the conditions right it, it might be
better to organize them along the lines of a group dental practice, where they
share the same building, perhaps a common receptionist and a few other
resources, and each do their own thing. A similar lesson emerges from experimental research on the differences
between decisions made in groups versus individuals. A series of studies show
that mean level of decision quality is about the same, but there is much wider
variance in decision quality in groups
compared to individuals. In other words,
groups either to a really good or a really bad job of making decisions – I
believe that Max Bazerman’s book on Managerial
Decision-Making reviews this research.
The
upshot of this research is that if you have well-functioning team – or if you
want to hire one, to return to my last post – then it is worth doing all you
can to keep them together and to building trust and a shared point of view. But
if you have bad group, where peopleagree that few things are worth doing
well, don’t believe in learning, is rife with fear and so on, the best you can
do (if you can’t disband them… sometimes a wise move) might be to reduce the
interdependence between them, to organize their work so they don’t see much of
each other, don’t have to work closely on tasks, and – applying the group
dental practice model – at least aren’t dragged down by each other.
Now, I confess, this is not the optimal
approach, and I love talking about great teams and top performance and
all that, but the fact is, there are times when –- at least for the forseeable future – it is a great
victory if you can move a team from being downright bad to being simply
mediocre. The other implication of this
research is that if you are leading – or part of – and effective “group dental
practice” that taking steps to tighten the links between people carries a
high risk of making things worse rather than better, especially if you don’t have the
resources, time, and power to do it right.
So,
teams aren’t a panacea; they are more like magnifying glasses or multipliers
that bring out the best – and worst – in people.
P.S. If you
want to see a strong argument that
individuals matter more than teams or organizations, see Locke, Edwin, A.,
Diana Tirnauer, Quinetta Roberson, Barry Goldman, Michael E, Latham, and
Elizabeth Weldon (2001). The
importance of the individual in the age of groupism. In Marlene E. Tuner’s
Groups at Work.Mahwaw, NJ:Earlbaum, 501-528. We try to show that this the authors take their argument too far in Hard Facts, but
this article is charming and well-argued.
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