October 2004
Vol. 2, No. 4
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From the Editor: Did you know that you can reduce human suffering through your job, regardless of what you do? Think of it: If you do your job well, you will reduce the suffering of the people you who receive your work output, whatever that output is. If they aren't your company organization customers, everyone between your job's customers and them will benefit to some degree. Your positive actions help your manager meet her goals with less hassle, reducing her suffering, and to smaller degrees her upper managers, even if they all fail to acknowledge it. You are in a position to make your colleagues' days better, without having to take a step out of your way—just by learning all you can to do your job better and applying what you learn. And it goes without saying that if you are a manager, you have a huge impact on the potential suffering of your employees. Making the effort to learn everything there is to know about being a good people manager, and you will improve lives. Plus, you know what? All of those people whose suffering you can reduce have friends and family who love them—even the ones you don't think are all that loveable—and who therefore have slightly better lives when you help their loved ones be in better moods.
Taking the time to read a newsletter like this is a big step toward helping your teammates and/or the team members who report to you have more contented lives. Implementing even one new idea you get is not just a step towards being a better worker, improving your chances at a raise or promotion. It's a step toward being a better human being.
Want to know just one thing you can do tomorrow to further reduce the suffering of your team members? Contact Jim today.
Study: Researcher Stuart Bunderson of Washington University in St. Louis wrote in a new study report, "groups seem to perform better and make better decisions when members share an accurate understanding of one another's expertise…" But where does that understanding come from? And how do other traits of the group work with that understanding to affect the group's performance?
Bunderson observed and surveyed 35 self-directed "production teams of a manufacturing facility in a Fortune 100 high-technology firm" in the U.S. to find out, and then asked shift supervisors and engineering managers to rate the teams' performances. He focused on two sets of "cues" that people might (rightly or wrongly) use to judge whether someone is an expert:
When experience cues are ignored, personal cues were enough to create expertise ratings: for example, when both people had no experience, a female in a racial minority group was 6.6 times less likely to be seen as an expert than a white male. The good news is, experience cues were much more powerful: that zero-experience white male was 140 times less likely to be seen as an expert than an experienced minority female with technical certification.
Teams who allowed in-team experts to sway their decisions performed better than those which did not. But many of these findings bring a messy reality to the process:
Application: I find it both sad and not surprising that in the absence of other information, humans will make judgements about someone's expertise based on what they look like. In the same turn, this study backs up at least 30 years of research showing that getting an education and technical training, and doing well enough to last in an industry or company—things we all can control—will overwhelm prejudices based on our appearance. If you are trying to get ahead in your career, the application is pretty obvious, especially if you are part of a minority group.
Regarding your teams, if you don't give the members a way of finding out who knows what, they will likely make poor assumptions about whom to listen to. That, in turn, will hurt your team's performance. Getting around this takes almost no investment, however. At the very least, when a group is forming, have members share their biographies, including experience, education, and relevant technical certifications, and job-related interests. Also record that information somewhere, such as in:
A balancing act is necessary, though: even experts can learn from novices. When I used to teach martial arts, I said that I always learned more from white belts (novices) than from black belts. People with little experience will come up with questions and responses that provide new insights and ideas, like the time a beginning student did exactly what my words told him to do and I ended up flat on my back! So always link an effort to identify experts with training on active listening and a team value of giving everyone a fair hearing.
The finding that informal coordinators were given higher expertise ratings based only on their position supports my strong recommendation in the SuddenTeams® Program that all roles on a team be rotated among members on a regular basis. Someone who facilitates meetings all the time will come to be viewed as the boss and given more influence than their experience warrants.
And, as usual, empower your teams to make more decisions. When more members are responsible for their personal and team's success, Bunderson wrote, they are motivated to put more effort into carefully choosing the experts they listen to.
Source: Bunderson, J.S. (03), "Recognizing and Utilizing Expertise in Work Groups: A Status Characteristics Perspective," Administrative Science Quarterly 48:557.
Study: The widespread use of stock options to promote good performance shows that top managers believe it's good to have employees feel a sense of ownership in the company. As is often the case, the research shows they are right about the results and wrong about the method: stock options have at best a weak link to company performance. And as usual, the ways that work are both cheaper and harder on managerial egos.
One of the most obvious is control over one's work life. If you own a car or house, within the limits of the law you have complete control over it. A professor of management, one in psychology, and a consultant looked at the connection between job control and sense of ownership through a survey of 239 individuals in a range of jobs and industries in New Zealand. A separate survey of the individuals' 71 managers allowed the researchers to compare the workers' and managers' opinions on the work environment. For this study, "control" was defined as the degree to which a worker was able to make decisions about his or her work. "Ownership" was the degree to which they felt personally responsible for workload or quality and used personal terms to describe their work: "'This is MY organization,' 'I sense that this is MY company.'"
The study found that the more control someone had over their work, the more ownership they felt. The work environment had a major impact on how much control the workers felt. The less routine the work, the more freedom they had to make decisions, and the more they participated in decision-making about their work, the more control they felt.
But it was not enough for those work conditions to be present. How much control the worker believed he or she had affected whether the right work environment actually created a sense of ownership. As marketers say, perception is everything.
Application: This study backs up common sense, but the researchers themselves point out that this is the first to ask about perceptions of control. Also, it only tells us that these factors are related to each other, and does not prove that, for example, a perception of control caused sense of ownership. Finally, it did not measure whether sense of ownership increased performance in this group of people, although that sense has in other studies.
That said, these preliminary findings support my belief in taking the time to formalize your teams. By granting them the time to create team values and goals, then supporting their efforts to achieve those goals, you provide clear proof to the members that they have more control over their hours at work than they had before. And this should work better than stock options at creating ownership because they can directly and immediately see the connection between the control they have and the performance of their group. I'm not an expert on stock options, but the studies I've skimmed indicate the problem is that these rewards are very delayed and therefore hard for the workers to link to their daily actions.
Source: Pierce, J., M. O'Driscoll, and A. Coghlan (04), "Work Environment Structure and Psychological Ownership: The Mediating Effects of Control," The Journal of Social Psychology 144(5):507.
Article: We have discussed in earlier issues the different effects of "personal" or "relationship" conflict within a team versus "task" conflicts. Teams that are capable of openly exchanging ideas and having hearty debates without having conflict are the ideal that is rarely achieved. Teams that have conflict over tasks without sinking into yelling and personal attacks are not as ideal but far more achievable and better than the alternative: Teams that break down into personal conflict, or "groupthink" to avoid conflict, are generally doomed.
What we have not discussed is the mechanisms that connect the two kinds of conflict—that lead a team from task conflict down into personal ugliness. Two management researchers at Louisiana State University have reviewed the research and come up with some ideas. Although their model is more a starting point for future research than a definite answer, it stands as the best "educated guess" to date. The connection they find also makes sense: emotion. Both the studies and common sense tell you that introducing negative emotions such as anger into a task conflict is going to help things go bad.
The questions then becomes, "How do you prevent those negative emotions from winning out?" These authors propose some ways. First, teams whose members have greater "emotional intelligence" (EI) will be better able to handle task conflict. EI means being able to recognize and express emotion accurately, understanding emotion, and controlling emotion in yourself and others. An individual with higher EI—and therefore a team with higher collective EI—should be better at coming come up with specific techniques such as controlling both internal emotion and outward displays during task debates.
Strong personal ties between people will help members see emotion in others as a "bad day" or mere frustration with a problem rather than as personal attacks or threats. Those ties also will increase trust, which in turn prevents negative emotion from rising through fear of the other person. Strong ties are built through spending time together, sharing emotions, doing favors for each other and feeling obligated to each other.
Finally, the authors suggested, having strong group norms against negative emotion will help teams resist personal conflict. For example, in one study, top management teams who regularly practiced (had a "norm" for) open exchanges of ideas experienced less relationship conflict. Norms encouraging positive emotion help, too: one study "discovered that humor on the job was common in the teams experiencing low relationship conflict…"
Application: Many people recognize the motivating power of emotion, both the positive and negative types. Better managers and coworkers try to excite their colleagues about a product or initiative; others yell and instill fear to get what they think they want. Few people I have known dealt well with the emotion of conflict, including myself at times. Either they tried to appease the emotional person, or they ignored it in the hopes it would go away. Presuming these authors are right,using either of these approaches during task conflict guarantees a slide down the slippery slope to damaging personal conflict. No doubt that is why far too many teams would rather squelch all possibility of conflict than take a chance on open team dialogue, despite the benefits the latter is proven to bring.
How can you face emotion straight on? Here are some ideas:
Finally, don't save your compassion for your friends and family. People who hurt others the most at work do so because they themselves are hurting the most.
Source: Yang, X., and K. Mossholder (04), "Decoupling Task and Relationship Conflict: The Role of Intragroup Emotional Processing," Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:589.
Article: We humans tend to look for the simple answer when we see a behavior we don't understand. When a generally polite person is suddenly rude, some of us will think "they're having a bad day" or "they don't feel well," or even, "I must have said something wrong." Rarely does it occur to us that all three might be true.
Unfortunately, scientific theory on what causes people to cooperate within groups have been equally simplistic. "By not considering that a variety of motives and beliefs might affect behaviour (within and across individuals) in a given situation, we limit our understanding of how co-operation could emerge from a mixture of motives that by themselves might not lead to co-operation," wrote Lívia Markóczy of the University of California-Riverside. She goes on to analyze, based on a review of previous studies, the various motives that could lead someone to cooperate (or not) with their teammates in a particular situation. It is important to note that she does not address cooperation between groups, because as you'll see, some motives that would decrease cooperation within the little world of the team could also increase it were the team pitted against another one.
Markóczy suggested the decision to cooperate starts with the situation. Aspects such as the size of the group, how well you know the others, and what has happened before in similar situations can by themselves affect the decision of whether to cooperate. Next add in your general beliefs. The degree to which you believe you personally can change a situation to help the group, the more cooperative you're likely to be, but the size of the group affects that sense of "efficacy": you'll likely assume you have less influence in a larger group. Similarly, the more trusting you are in others, the more likely you are to cooperate with them, but that level of trust goes up when you know people better. Another belief that is the idea that if you cooperate with others, they will return that cooperation.
The situation and your beliefs, Markóczy argued, combine to create a prediction about how a situation will come out, which adds into your decision to cooperate. If you trust others in a group and the group has lived up to the trust, you expect trusting them to turn out well. That, in turn, makes you more willing to cooperate. The story becomes more complicated if you trust people in general, but the group has not proven trustworthy in the past.
At this point, she said, more specific motives enter the picture. Altruism obviously leads to cooperation. But the research says it can be heavily affected by how similar you are to the group, among other things, and the situation, such as (again) how much the others have cooperated. "Elite participants," people who like to "make a difference and to start out something new," are likely to cooperate if they think it will help them achieve something, However, they might lose interest more quickly if the movement they help start becomes popular, because then they want to move on to something new. The opposite type, the "mass participant" who likes to be involved in something big, is not enough by itself to get someone to cooperate, Markóczy said, but could kick it into gear when a project becomes a big deal.
An obvious combination of situation and motive is "fairness": someone driven by the need to be fair (or fairly treated) will definitely react according to how much others are cooperating. On the other hand, "greed" might seem like the kind of motive that prevents someone from cooperating with others. Yet if the situation leads that person to think cooperating will help them get more for themselves, it could cause greater cooperation. "Fear" of being betrayed would clearly reduce the tendency to cooperate. (This is a case where I would argue it could cause more cooperation if the group was seen as providing protection from another threat, but again, this paper was focused on situations within a team.) Clearly both competitiveness and spite are motives that will prevent cooperation—unless, again I suggest, those motives were directed at another group.
The article mentions one motive I hadn't thought of: "Beating the system (cool)," defined as "the desire to distinguish oneself from the crowd." Markóczy found little research on this, but noted that "the cool motive would lead to co-operation if others were not co-operating while leading to non-co-operation if others are co-operating."
Combining one's expectation about how cooperation will turn out with these motives is what brings us to our decision to cooperate, and how much, Markóczy wrote. Of course, sometimes motives conflict, making the decision difficult. Other times several act at once, and of course, on a team of people who are cooperating, they could be doing so for quite a wide range of reasons. Markóczy said these conclusions are "unattractive," because they mean it will be very hard to come up with one "grand theory that will explain all the motives and their relations to other factors." The plus side is that they also could lead to more realistic research into cooperation and therefore better guidance for those of us dedicated to increasing cooperation in groups.
Application: I think we all know in the back of our minds that life is lot more complex than we wish it were. As either a good teammate or team manager, though, you want to motivate team members to work together, and this complex model of motivation makes it difficult to know what will work, or even if something you tried was what did the trick. You can't even rely on people's opinions afterward; when motives conflict, Markóczy wrote, "the individual may be able to recall and recognize only those motives that are consistent with the decision, suppressing the inconsistent ones."
But I choose to see all this as good news. First, if something you say or do to get people to work together does not seem to work, don't feel bad: you just haven't hit the right notes (not just "note") yet. Second, if your attempt seems to have mixed results, Markóczy's theory explains why. Not only do different individuals have different beliefs and motives, each person has different ones coming into play internally. Finally, if you seem to finally take the action that got a group moving forward, don't be surprised if the same action doesn't work as well when a different situation presents itself or with a different group.
Why is all this good news? Because the failure to motivate does not mean you are a bad manager or bad teammate. Bearing that in mind should keep you from getting discouraged as you wend your way through this complex world of team motivation.
Source: Markóczy, L. (04), "Multiple Motives Behind Single Acts of Co-operation," International Journal of Human Resource Management 15(6):1018.
Article: When a professor of management studies in an endowed position at McGill University, the author of 13 books on management, says MBA programs do not produce "managers," it has to capture your attention. If you are struggling to get managers in your company to use proven techniques for improving team performance, the rest of Henry Mintzberg's interview in "Across the Board" magazine will sound disturbingly familiar. His basic premise is that because MBA programs take in people with no management experience; focus on the functions of a business instead of the people; and tend therefore to attract students more interested in techniques than people; those programs turn out functional technicians, not people managers. As a short bonus summary for this month, here are a few of his more thought-provoking quotations:
Source: Vogl, A.J. (04), "Managerial Correctness," Across the Board, July/August:19.
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