Shared Vision May Improve Company Performance through Cooperative Team Goals

Getting team members to cooperate on goals is vital to high productivity. Getting teams to cooperate on goals prevents their productivity from being counter-productive for the company. A management research team in China decided to look at the possible role in that effort of "shared vision," defined as "a future ideal state to which employees themselves are committed. The vision must be shared through discussion so that it is known and valued throughout the organization." The researchers wanted to know if and how shared vision was linked to "organizational citizenship behavior" or OCB, "activities that support the… environment in which the central tasks of organizations are accomplished." OCB has been shown to improve productivity.

Their theory was, if people on cross-functional teams think other teams are just looking out for themselves—or worse, trying to look good compared to other teams—those people are less likely to help colleagues outside their teams. The researchers analyzed a survey completed by 101 leaders of cross-functional teams and 292 of their team members. Their firms were a wide variety of types (single-owner companies to China-foreign joint ventures) from a variety of industries, manufacturing to consulting to retail. If team members perceived a shared company vision, the analysis showed, the team leader was:

• More likely to rate the team's goals as cooperative with those of other teams.
• Less likely to rate the goals as independent of or competitive with the other teams' goals.
• More likely to rate their team members highly on OCB behaviors such as helping colleagues and going beyond the minimum requirements of their jobs.

The direct correlation between shared vision and OCB was weaker than the correlations between vision and cooperative goals on the one hand, and cooperative goals and OCB on the other. So cooperative goals are probably one way shared vision fosters OCB. The researchers conclude "a shared vision and cooperative goals among departments are important foundations so that cross-functional teams contribute to the effective working of the organization…"

The authors say people may question whether results from China are applicable elsewhere in the world, because Chinese culture is known to emphasize harmony more than most Western cultures do. But they this "collectivist" attitude plays out at the small-group level by increasing loyalty to the small group and bias against non-group members. The authors assert that a Chinese sample may thus be a specially good one for testing their theories. [Editor's note: It also makes Chinese teams more similar to Western teams than different in that regard, consistent with other cross-cultural studies I've seen.]

Source: Wong, A., D. Tjosvold, and C. Liu (09), "Cross-Functional Team Organizational Behavior in China: Shared Vision and Goal Interdependence Among Departments," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 39(12):2879.