Year in Review: Meshing with the rest

Reviewing the research we featured in 2013, one theme that jumped out to me was the search for that elusive formula that helps people align and click with each other. We talked about managers last post, but as important as they are, most of us spend as much or more time interacting with peers. How do we make that work?

First impressions matter. Putting yourself in a positive and empowered mindset before meeting a new team leads to people giving you a higher status during the meeting - and that tends to get fixed long-term. However, we also learned that initial status can shift in unexpected ways: extraversion is a good short-term tool for getting people to pay attention to you, but after a couple of months the novelty wears off (or becomes actively overbearing). By this point, quieter and less positive neurotics have busied away with getting stuff done, to acquire social approval and appear competent. As a consequence, their value rises in team-mates’ eyes. The lesson from is that it's good to take a positive, empowered and more extraverted stance early in team relationships, but not hang on too hard to extravert behaviours. A less extraverted, more neurotic individual who takes a moment to get into a good mental state before their first team meeting may be on to a winner.

What about team diversity? The research here is getting more nuanced, and we now have evidence that teams that split into two effective identities - old-schoolers versus overseas MBAs, for instance - tend to perform worse due to tribalism and lack of communication. More than two is actually a better situation for assimilation. And teams that have a clear emphasis on learning as an outcome benefit more from diversity, as taking the time to better understand the different points of view offered by a diverse team is seen as sensible, rather than a distraction from getting-it-done. So to make more of diverse members, prize learning and avoid forming binary factions.

Sometimes, helping out is just a matter of recognising that you need to pull your weight. When slackers find out that they are spoiling the system for others, they get more proactive and helpful in all sorts of ways. And some people just tend to help out - including people who have ADHD, who may prioritise assistance of others over their own tasks and deadlines. Overall, we're getting a better picture of what 21st century helping behaviours look like, as part of the broader 21st century organisational citizenship behaviours that differentiate a great place to work.

Offer advice when it's likely to be heard - such as when people are in the right emotional states. It's not simply about good and bad moods, however. When we're feeling good about other people, we're generally open to input. But when we feel good about ourselves, we  inflate our sense of competence and are less interested in other perspectives. Negative emotions show a flip-flop effect. So if you think someone needs to hear some advice, pay attention to the state that they are in and time your contribution accordingly.

• If you are shaping a team, you should design for best use of diversity: promoting learning outcomes and balancing membership to avoid us-versus-them situations.
• If you are joining a team, start with a positive attitude but be aware of what the team really needs long-term.
• If you want to make your team run better, you should communicate what acceptable behaviour looks like, what poor behaviour costs us all, and what standout behaviours help the organisation go beyond expectations.

Subgroups in teams: when two is the worst number

Every team contains the seed of the subgroup – a group that forms within a group. Common interests, background, or habits may lead some people to interact in their own specific dynamic. There isn't yet a research consensus on the consequences of subgroups, but happily a new paper by Andrew Carton and Jonathon Cummings helps us understand the context in which there can be benefits or burdens.

One area that researchers agree on is the disruptive nature of especially strong fault lines: deep differences between team members that allow subgroups to emerge. If a minority of a group are white, young, female, and of a technical background, and the remainder share none of those attributes, the team are likely to be fragmented and performance will suffer . But before now other questions have remained unanswered: is it worse to have more or fewer subgroups? And is it better if they are balanced, of a similar size?

The study looked at 326 teams from a food service and processing company, all participants in an internal tournament to demonstrate excellence through actions like developing better customer service. Carton and Cummings developed an algorithm that examined several possible fault lines in each team to determine whether it contains subgroups, and if so, how many and on what basis. These subgroup features were then related to how the team performed in the tournament.

The researchers predicted that number and balance of subgroups have different effects depending on the fault lines that define them. Identity-based fault lines, including age and gender,  are strong lines that can encourage in-group/out-group thinking. As expected, groups that contained two, evenly matched identity-based subgroups performed worse than any other combination, as this 'us and them' situation can increase territoriality, where both sides feel threatened by the other.

Knowledge-based fault lines occur when a subgroup shares different sources of information, such as when they have a different reporting channel in the business. These lack overt in-group cues, and  so they’re less disruptive. In fact  they offer multiple perspectives – handy for solving problems. As predicted, the more of these, the better, and more so when the groups were balanced in number, as this reduces the likelihood that voices are discounted.

The categorisation of subgroups by algorithm, without any validation, seems a limitation of the study. We don't actually know if team 23 actually had two subgroups based on gender, only that the algorithm was satisfied there would be. I would like to see follow-up work that verifies the finding is genuinely due to grouping factors, not the mix of members in a more general sense. Nevertheless, it takes us a step closer to understanding team performance, and how decisions about team composition can have emergent effects upon performance.

Carton AM, & Cummings JN (2013). The impact of subgroup type and subgroup configurational properties on work team performance. The Journal of applied psychology, 98 (5), 732-58 PMID: 23915429

Further reading:
Cohen, S. G., & Bailey, D. E. (1997). What makes teams work: Group effectiveness research from the shop floor to the executive suite. Journal of Management, 23, 239 –290. DOI:10.1177/014920639702300303
 

Is it better to enter negotiations with a team? It depends on your culture

Research suggests that negotiating parties tend to benefit when fielding a team rather than an individual. Generally, more heads are better than one, providing more ideas, helping to synthesise new information, correct each others biases and keep each other on target. Evidence suggests that even a single team operating in a negotiation (versus a solo counterpart) is sufficient to produce outcomes better for both parties. However, a research team led by Michele Gelfand has explored how universal this finding is, and provides data that suggests a different pattern in certain cultural contexts.

The research was conducted at universities in the United States and Taiwan. In each location, students (144 US, 100 Taiwanese) were recruited into a standard negotiation task, where parties are asked to decide how a new business will be run by finding agreement on four different factors. Each factor had various possible outcomes that led to different points awarded to the two parties, who sought to maximise this. Each negotiation was either between two pairs of negotiators, or between two single negotiators.

In the US sample, negotiations involving teams reached as positive outcomes as those helmed by individuals. (Note that teams didn't actually do better, as previous research would have suggested. The researchers suggest the anomaly may have occurred because the four-factor task was not cognitively demanding enough to benefit from many heads). But in the Taiwanese sample, worse collective outcomes were reached when groups were negotiating rather than individuals. The paper also presents an initial sample with smaller sample sizes that bears out this finding: specifically for Taiwanese negotiators, teams performed worse.

Neither national culture nor type of negotiation alone influenced performance, but their interaction did. Why? Gelfand's team decided to conduct this research because one effect of groups is norm amplification: a greater likelihood of behaving in line with your culture. This can be in sync with your goals or in tension with them. The researchers believed that individualistic norms found in the US encourage fighting for your corner and thus help push negotiations into hard but fruitful places. But collectivist norms that prize harmony and agreement may mean negotiations are handled tentatively and non-optimally; this is a component of Taiwanese culture. After the negotiation, all participants identified via a questionnaire how much they believed group harmony was important. Analysis showed that in the team conditions, was what was driving the performance difference between US and Taiwanese students was the higher harmony emphasis in the Taiwanese negotiations.

This research is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it helps us tease out the various effects teams have on negotiations. here raising the importance of norm amplification. It may be for instance that negotiations between friends also evoke a harmony norm, regardless of nationality, making teamwork possibly unwise. Secondly, this work illustrates 'the value of shifting the focus from static cultural differences to cultural dynamics'. By looking at behaviour across contexts, we arrive at a richer understanding of how cultures differ.

Michele J. Gelfand, Jeanne Brett, Brian C. Gunia, Lynn Imai, Tsai-Jung Huang, & Bi-Fen Hsu (2013). Toward a Culture-by-Context Perspective on Negotiation: Negotiating Teams in the United States and Taiwan Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (3), 504-513 DOI: 10.1037/a0031908

When is it better to be a directive or an empowering leader?

In its early existence, a team led with a clear, directive approach outperforms one with a leader who is hands-off and emphasises empowerment. Over time, however, the empowered team forges insights and patterns of working that lead it to improve performance at a higher rate than directed teams. This is the finding from a new article by Natalia Lorinkova, Matthew Pearsall, and Henry Sims Jr, that aims to help solve the uncertainties about which leadership style is better. For them, the question is not which, but when.

The researchers investigated this issue using a computer strategy task undertaken by 60 5-person teams, each composed of undergraduates. Team members had distinct roles and had to coordinate actions to verify the accuracy of intel produced by Intelligence players to identify 'sweet spots' where their surveillance was highly accurate, traverse the battlefield safely and destroy enemies. My criticism of this study is that this kind of activity is very far from typical workplace activity, and the time-scales - one 3-hour session - out of proportion from the normal maturation of a work team. With that out of the way, the methodology is interesting, and the results notable.

The study required teams to be led by directive or empowering leaders. The directive style involves clear directions, explicit feedback, and minimises ambiguity on what you are supposed to do, similar to the 'tough leadership style'. An empowering style encourages followers to take ownership for tasks, and find their own norms of how to work well together. When they were recruited, participants completed measures of each style. The 30 highest scorers in directive leadership were each assigned leadership of a team, and additionally provided with pre-session training: 30 minutes including watching a clip from Apollo 13 showcasing the desired style and roleplaying out its behaviours. They were then provided with a 'cheat sheet' of advice to give, and a short speech to give at the outset of the task, that all reinforced their directive status. The other 30 teams were led by those scoring highest in empowering leadership, who received comparable training and resources.

After orientation and explanation of the task, teams completed 10 rounds of the task, with a break half-way through. The researchers predicted that the clarity of directive leadership enhances team performance within a stage of team development called 'role compilation'. Meanwhile, empoweringly-led teams use this stage to invest effort into figuring each other out, which pays off for them during a subsequent stage called 'team compilation' when the unit should be purring along. This is based on a four-stage model of team development by Kozlowski et al. (1999), but the mapping of role compilation onto rounds 1-5 and team compilation onto 6-10 seems a little arbitrary to me. Lorinkova's team do point out that risk-taking behaviour dropped between 1-5 and 6-10, suggesting they had moved to more routinised action.

Directive leaders earned higher performance in the task during rounds 1-5, but over stages 6-10 the empowered teams improved at a higher rate, leading to comparable performance by the end. The analysis confirmed several reasons behind this: the empowered groups learned to coordinate better, felt psychologically more in control, and after the study end were more accurate at characterising their colleague's capabilities and focus in a separate task. When entered into the analysis beforehand, the effect of empowered leadership could no longer be detected, suggesting that these were the routes through which empowerment was having its effect.

The authors would like to see this research conducted over longer time-scales, using set-ups more reflective of the workplace. However, this study already raises an important angle on leadership style: its impact may be profoundly tied to context, in particular the developmental stage of a team. Existing models emphasise the need for individual follower readiness for empowering leadership to work - some people may not expect nor desire ownership of tasks and the freedom to choose methods. But this research points to the dynamical processes within a team - where members stand in relation to one another and the team as a whole. The reliance on cross-sectional methodology in many leadership style studies may explain the controversy between studies: measuring at round 4 or round 9 would have produced very different conclusions about the relative benefits.

In conclusion, Lorinkova and colleagues offer a warning of taking these findings too simplistically: 'Although there may be some advantage to employing a combination of the two leadership approaches (e.g., Gratton & Erickson, 2007), our results suggest that the benefits of empowering leadership in teams tended to manifest because team members initially engaged in role identification and learning processes during the role compilation phase. Empowered teams, therefore, may not be able to reap the benefits of improved performance over time without first suffering the initial performance delays.'

Natalia M. Lorinkova, Matthew J. Pearsall, & Henry P. Sims Jr (2013). Examining the differential longitudinal performance of directive versus empowering leadership in teams Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 573-596 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0132

Further reading: 
Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. 2011. Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96: 981–1003.
 

Job outcomes and experiences suffer when managers regularly work remotely

Technology gives us the option to work in locations beyond conventional offices, both partially - termed teleworking - or as a full-time 'virtual' worker. We now understand that remote workers experience certain challenges such as isolation and less access to resources. But there is scant research on the consequences of a teleworking or virtual manager. Fortunately, a new article gets us up to speed.

Investigators Timothy D Golden and Allan Fromen surveyed over 11,000 employees from a Fortune 500 company based in the US. The online survey asked each respondent to report - for themselves and for their manager - what their work mode was: traditional (in the office full time), teleworking away for a consistent fraction of the work week, or fully virtual. It also measured a host of work experiences and outcomes. Respondents managed by teleworking managers reported receiving less feedback and professional development, a more unbalanced workload and feeling less empowered. A similar negative pattern was found for those with fully virtual managers. The effect sizes were small overall, suggesting this needn't be a make or break issue, but the trend was there.

The authors interpret this in terms of social exchange theory. Working relationships that are partly virtual have less opportunities for rich exchanges, with communications lacking the face-to-face component and fewer obvious opportunities to 'grab a moment', described by social innovator David Engwicht as spontaneous exchanges. Interactions are likely to be more task-focused and obligatory, as email is more onerous to produce when compared to a quick coffee or moment in the corridor. And professional development and mentoring becomes similarly laborious, always a dangerous place for any 'important to do' but non-urgent activity to be.

How about those respondents who themselves worked remotely? The data suggests they have a similar experience regardless of their manager's work mode. The authors had predicted this group would experience better conditions when their manager also worked non-traditionally: they would both experience comparable challenges and make efforts to find mutually productive outcomes. But in reality, higher scores on the outcome variables were only found in a few instances and were extremely small. This suggests that if you don't share physical space with your manager, it doesn't matter much where they happen to be.

It's worth noting that in the US, rates of teleworking dropped between 2008 and 2010. Perhaps organisations and individuals have begun to appreciate that the attractions of remote working are tempered by modest but genuine drawbacks.

Golden, T., & Fromen, A. (2011). Does it matter where your manager works? Comparing managerial work mode (traditional, telework, virtual) across subordinate work experiences and outcomes Human Relations, 64 (11), 1451-1475 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711418387

Offering pseudo opportunities for expression to employees leads to conflict and withdrawal of voice

Giving organisational members a say on work-related issues is well understood to heighten a sense of trust, respect and fairness. But a manager who invites opinions may not be planning to consider them. They may want to increase employee engagement through paying lip service to 'dialogue'; they may be an autocrat who feels obliged to appear consistent with the organisation's ethos; they may be reflexively doing something they were told to do at business school. So what happens when the opportunity to express is a case of 'pseudo voice' ... and the employees know it?

Gerdien de Vries, Baren Jehn and Bart Terwel investigated this issue by collecting survey data from 137 workers in a Dutch healthcare institution. Each participant rated the presence of two facets necessary for pseudo voice: did they have opportunity to express their voice? and did they believe their manager would disregard it? When the interaction between these was high, employees tended to give low scores to another measure, the extent to which they took opportunities to voice their opinions. In other words, perceiving deceit led to employees keeping their perspectives on issues to themselves.

The participants also rated the amount of intragroup conflict they experienced. De Vreis and colleagues suspected that when employees withdraw voice because they perceive the opportunity as a sham, conflict may increase: employees respond to this 'organisational illegitimacy' by refusing to play by the rules themselves, or squabble with colleagues in a displaced attempt to reclaim some kind of control. The data duly demonstrated this: participants who perceived pseudo voice experienced more team conflict than those who believed their managers were sincere.

Providing employees with voice is important; as well as its cohesive effects, it provides the organisation with a diversity of perspectives. As its authors note, this study is useful as it "provides a better understanding of the conditions under which offering voice opportunity to employees is likely to backfire" - namely, when they are seen as insincere and deceptive. It's notable that in this study, managers indicated a disregard for voice higher than employees suspected, suggesting if anything the employees were credulous rather than cynical towards management contempt for their opinions. But Machiavellian managers who think an unread suggestion box is a worthwhile gamble should beware; as this study shows, the costs to organisational functioning can be substantial.

(Thanks to reader Chris Woock for bringing this article to the Digest's attention.)

Vries, G., Jehn, K., & Terwel, B. (2011). When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations Journal of Business Ethics DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0960-4

Why do subgroups emerge? And how do groups stay productive if they do?

Group working can be sociable, fulfilling and effective, yet there are many ways for it to fall short of the ideal. A mass of similar opinions can lead to groupthink, rushing to agreement without questioning a line of thinking. But a group splintering into subgroups can also lead to problems. Subgrouping doesn't take much, as minimal group research has revealed, and it creates barriers across which information struggles to flow, due to confusion or outright hostility. A new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior explains how two kinds of group integration – cognition and emotion – influence the impact of subgroups in rather different ways.

A team of researchers lead by Matthew Cronin looked at performance of MBA students in teams of five or six participating in a 14-week business simulation exercise. They surveyed the 321 participants twice, once about three weeks before the end and again at the close of the exercise, determining the extent to which the team had formed subgroups and how satisfied individuals felt about being part of the team.

The researchers also took two measures of integration: affective integration, probing how much they liked and trusted the rest of the team, and cognitive integration, how much common ground members share in terms of how they look at the world. They were interested in how these variables ultimately affected the group' satisfaction, measured in the final survey, and its performance, determined by the final company earnings it achieved.

The data revealed a vicious circle: less affective integration made it more likely that subgroups would emerge later, and more definite subgroups led to subsequent lower integration. Falling into this pattern meant team members felt less satisfied about being part of the team at the end of the event. Moreover, as subgroups emerged, team performance also suffered. But this effect was dampened when there was good cognitive integration. That is, when members are divided, possess diverging agendas and may not particularly like each other, they can still get the job done if they share a framework for looking at the world.

This study is valuable in untangling some of the distinct processes that contribute to healthy team working. In the words of the authors, cognitive integration can “prevent the harm that subgroups can potentially create”. But to stop the subgroups forming in the first place, it comes down to preventing that slide into us-vs-them and the lack of trust that it feeds and is fed by. Stakeholders who want a group to succeed should consider interventions, and make them early to avoid the rot setting in.

Cronin, M., Bezrukova, K., Weingart, L., & Tinsley, C. (2011). Subgroups within a team: The role of cognitive and affective integration Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 831-849 DOI: 10.1002/job.707

Help on tasks boosts creativity for the seeker but impedes it for the giver

Seeking help from others gets us to more creative solutions, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology. However, there's a rub: being a help-giver may impede creatively solving your own problems, and seeking and helping turn out to be intimately related.

In a collaboration between the Indian School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania, Jennifer Mueller and Dishan Kamdar surveyed engineers at a refinery in central India, who work in teams that try to find creative ways to improve operations. The 291 mainly male participants assessed themselves on help-seeking by rating items like “I frequently ask team-mates for assistance in creative problem solving”. They also completed a complementary measure of help-giving, together with measures of motivation and a control measure of 'creative personality'.

The study found that individuals who sought more help were rated as more creative by their team leaders. The investigators suggest two reasons for this. Firstly, help-seekers receive new information to form a broader base to construct solutions from. Perhaps more importantly, seeking help requires you accept that you don't have all the answers, making you more open to new perspectives. As such, it wards off that major obstacle to creativity: locking into a 'perceptual set' that obscures any alternative view.

The authors felt that help seeking might shed some light on an issue in creativity research: whether being intrinsically motivated to solve a problem leads to more creative solutions. They felt that rather than firing up some creative centre, motivation might operate by making you do something you wouldn't otherwise: admit your limitations by seeking some help. And the data corroborates this, suggesting creativity is enhanced by motivation partly through an increase in help-seeking.

So far, so good. But the research found that people who received help tended to reciprocate it back on other occasions, and, crucially, that giving more help was associated with a cost to creativity. Why? Well, working on others' problems may restrict the time available for your own, and we know that creativity suffers under high time pressure. The authors also suspect an attitude shift: just as the help seeker humbly surrenders their suppositions, the help provider can be flattered into believing their perspective is objectively better, reinforcing fixed ways of thinking.

On balance, help-seeking did lead to more creativity, even when the reciprocal demands were high; a culture of help is ultimately superior to a lone-wolf one. Organisations may want to think about ways to inoculate their members against putting their viewpoint on a pedestal, even when others seem to value it. And help-seekers may want to ensure that their requests don't swamp an accommodating help-giver. Yet we have to face facts: for creative help-seeking to flourish, that help needs to come from someone prepared to pay the cost.

Mueller, J., & Kamdar, D. (2011). Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse: A theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 263-276 DOI: 10.1037/a0021574

Psychologically safe teams can incubate bad behaviour

When impropriety or corruption emerges in an organisation, some cry “bad apple!” where others reply “more like bad barrel!” Yet between individuals and organisations we have teams, the context in which decisions are increasingly made. A new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology sheds some light on what it takes for teams to behave badly.

Researchers Matthew Pearsall and Aleksander Ellis recruited 378 undergraduate management studies students (about 1/3 female), already organised into study groups of three who had collaborated for months. Participants were asked to rate themselves on items relating to different philosophical outlooks, the pertinent one being utilitarianism, where the focus is on outcomes. Previous research suggests individuals who highly value utilitarianism tend to behave more unethically, as they are more prepared to bend rules or mislead if they perceive the ends to justify the means. Pearsall and Ellis suspected the same to be true in groups.

Each team was given a real opportunity to behave unethically, by cheating in the self-evaluation of a piece of coursework. Buried within the scoring criteria was an issue that could not possibly have been covered in the assignment, meaning any team that ticked this off was faking it. As expected, teams with a higher average utilitarianism score were more likely to cheat, mirroring the effect found for individuals.

However, there is an protective buffer against acting unethically in a team. You may be willing to bend the rules, and even suspect others share your view... but do you really want to be the first to say so out loud? Pearsall and Ellis predicted that making this step requires a strong feeling of psychological safety, the sense that others will not judge or report you for speaking out or taking risks. It turns out that the cheating behaviour observed in teams with high utilitarianism scores was almost entirely dependent on a psychologically safe environment, as measured using items like “It is safe to take a risk on this team”. Lacking that safe environment, the highly utilitarian teams were almost as well-behaved as their lower-scoring counterparts.

The researchers note that academic cheating involves relatively low stakes, so this may be a constraint on how far we should generalise to other situations. They also emphasise that psychological safety is generally something we prize in teams, and rightly so: through facilitating open communication and consideration of alternate views it can enhance performance, learning and adaptation to change. However, this evidence suggests that it can also incubate unethical behaviour, and the researchers urge that the field continues to look beyond the traits of individual miscreants to consider state factors such as psychological safety, that allow bad behaviour to take root.

Pearsall, M., & Ellis, A. (2011). Thick as thieves: The effects of ethical orientation and psychological safety on unethical team behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (2), 401-411 DOI: 10.1037/a0021503