April 2006
Vol. 3, No. 10
This newsletter is a basic HTML file, giving you control over the appearance through your Web browser's options and window controls.
From the Editor: When I am trying to help people with personal problems, I lead them to probe their "Ultimate Question." The basic premise is that people who spend their time seeking answers to big life questions are focused on the wrong part of the equation. The correct answer for a given life question will change as your circumstances change. For example, your answer to the question, "What kind of job do I want?" has surely changed at least once since you left school, and probably more than once. But if you're like most people, the same question has popped up again and again.
Usually each question has underlying questions. In this case, they might be:
Looking at the themes or patterns in these questions can usually bring us to what I call the person's "Ultimate Question," an ultimately unanswerable question that they keep trying to answer anyway, causing various problems. One friend's Ultimate Question turned out to be, "How do I keep from getting bored?" It's not surprising, since he spent his entire childhood in a place that offered no outlets for his creative talents (he is an amazing professional artist now). There have been times in his life where things were generally going well but therefore boring, thus triggering his Ultimate Question, and he ended up subconsciously causing problems for himself because the excitement was worth the pain.
My point, in relation to our change-lesson series, is that the answer you have come up with, the corrected external response you are now using when confronted with an action or thought that used to cause improper actions by you or your team, may not always be the correct answer. As you grow and people around you change, when you go to different workplaces or join different teams, and so on, you'll probably have to find new ways to deal with that initial trigger event. Falling into the comfortable sense that you have "solved the problem" is nearly as bad as never dealing with the problem in the first place. So I leave this series with a line I use with every team I work with, one I hope you will keep close in every aspect of your life: "Change is neither bad or good; it is merely inevitable. So the only question is, do you manage change, or does change manage you?"
What recurring questions are underlying your team's problems? If your team seems to get stuck in the same cycle of behaviors, identifying the root drivers is the way out of the loop. Contact me today to find out how.
Study: Ensuring the efforts of each member of a team are visible to the rest may help ensure everyone does their share, according to a study of a work team far removed in every way from the business teams usually discussed in business journals.
Michael Price, a business professor at Washington University (St. Louis, USA), conducts research in a village of native hunter-farmers called the Shuar in Ecuador. Though they have contact with the more-developed world, the Shuar still have a strong traditional culture. When something requiring a group effort needs to be done, what they call a "minga," they create a volunteer team that elects its own leader. It is the equivalent of one type of self-directed project team in the corporate world.
Price observed a team formed to harvest and process sugar cane, rating their average level of effort through a series of observations every five minutes over six mingas. He also had members compare each person against each other member a pair at a time to determine average ratings of members' work effort, perceived absences (excused and unexcused), and reputations. Absence ratings were compared to the careful records the group kept. If a member was judged to have been absent for no good reason, he or she was docked the amount of money the member could have earned working for hire for a day!
Price compared all of these ratings, and found essentially what you would find in any corporate boardroom. Members were very good at recognizing which teammates didn't work as hard as the others, either by not putting in as much effort in the fields or by not showing up at all. And the reputation of those "free riders" was hurt by it (except in the case of the elected team leader, who enjoyed the most respect despite being viewed as only the 7th-hardest worker). Age, by the way, had little effect on the reputation ratings. Also, justified absences—those "due to some incapacitating sickness or injury that the member did not voluntarily bring upon himself or herself"—did not harm a member's reputation.
Though Price drew some practical suggestions from this work (see below), his main intent was to feed into the growing evidence that humans have good evolutionary reasons for cooperating with each other. At first glance, offering to cooperate makes no sense. If a genetic mutation came along that caused people to cooperate, and they had to compete against people who took advantage of that urge by not cooperating back, the cooperation gene should have died out. But what if cooperators also developed a trait that made it easy for other cooperators to identify them? (As an illustration, one scientist jokingly suggested a green beard.) The ability to monitor the behaviors of other people, and accurately judge whether the cooperator is getting back as much as they give, might be that "green beard." And the fact that this monitoring has been found by scientists to occur in many countries, activities, and organizational types and levels strengthens the likelihood that cooperation is not simply something passed through cultural learning.
Application: The greenbeard theory, Price writes, suggests that the ability to monitor the cooperation of others will increase a worker's willingness to cooperate in return. The Shuar team members "appeared to monitor each other constantly, and their ability to do so was enhanced by the fact that they always worked together in the same place and at the same time." This is likely one of the reasons why teams of people sitting in the same office usually perform better than similar teams that are virtual. It also partially explains why large teams don't work too well, because it's harder to monitor a lot of people.
What if your team has to be virtual? Find ways to publicly track the contributions of individual team members. One method is action items, which I have discussed often. Right now I am managing a project with team members in India and two states in the U.S. I proposed and they accepted a procedure in which any time two or more members make a decision, they will write action items including:
All team-wide action items will be posted to a team web site, and members are encouraged to post all others as well. It will soon become clear to them who is taking on work and who is accomplishing the work they take on.
Source: Price, M., (06), "Monitoring, Reputation, and 'Greenbeard' Reciprocity in a Shuar Work Team," Journal of Organizational Behavior 27:201.
Article: Differences in the way men and women act in work groups aren't just about gender, according to a research analysis by American and Filipino scientists: they're about sex. Recognizing the basic evolutionary drives behind those differences may allow managers to address the differences more effectively.
The typical male is more likely to try to dominate group work, while the typical female works harder at building consensus. Various theories have been suggested for why this is, such as cultural pressures telling each gender to act a certain way. But those theories have not been well supported by research, according to psychology professors Stephen Colarelli, Jennifer Spranger, and Regina Hechanova. Instead, these researchers turned to the field known as "evolutionary psychology," which seems able to explain a large number of human behaviors that persist across time, countries and cultures by looking at the prehistoric behaviors of humankind.
The approach starts with basic biology. Evolution is a competition for "survival of the fittest," but contrary to popular conceptions (no pun intended!), the game is not between people but between genes. Genes that give people traits that help them survive and to have more children who survive and have more children, and so on, are the "winners" of this game. Women take nine months to produce a single child, a period during which men can theoretically father hundreds of progeny. Since both genders are driven to spread their genes as widely as possible through later generations, but have different levels of personal investment in each child, they therefore have to take very different approaches to this game. Men try to do so by mating with as many different women as possible. Women do so by trying to mate only with men they think will pass along traits that will help their children to survive, and be able and willing to provide the resources like food and shelter required.
What does this have to do with gender behavior in work teams? In their review of the science of teams, the authors found four relevant trends:
We cannot directly observe how ancient humans acted, but we can get strong clues by looking at similarities between: children in developed cultures; our closest relatives in the ape world; traditional cultures that live more like our common ancestors did ("hunter-gatherers"); and archaeological evidence. Competition, for example, emerges very early in humans, "beginning at around age 5, when boys and girls begin to form same-sex play groups," and in groups of chimpanzees. Since men want more opportunities for sex than women, competition among men for access to women is natural. Since women "would tend to prefer… men who could successfully compete for resources," men who "are the best hunters or who are strong, clever, and quick-witted tend to have more status and a greater number of wives and sexual liaisons." The mechanism that creates this competitive urge is higher levels in men of various hormones such as testosterone.
Dominance behaviors follow similar patterns to competitive behaviors. All-male groups show much higher levels of members trying to dominate each other than do female groups. That is, males "interrupt more, take more speaking time, and maintain more eye contact," the authors write. In male groups, members who speak first are more "verbally assertive" than those speaking later. But those differences don't show up in female groups. In mixed-gender groups, this means men tend to dominate the discussions in face-to-face meetings. In virtual meetings many of those difference disappear, indicating that dominance is based on nonverbal cues.
The difference in dominance plays out strikingly in prisons, where groups develop in very different ways. Male prison groups tend to be small groups of inmates, each "controlled by and loyal to a leader who provides both physical and economic support to its members," with definite levels in who controls whom within each group. But female prison groups tend to look like families, where each person plays a role, but "(c)ooperation, mutual aid and cohesion are important facets." Dominance served ancient males well for two reasons. First, males wanted dominance because it gave them more control over the group's resources, and thus attracted more female attention. Second, male work like hunting for big game and protecting the group from attacks required quick decision-making that did not allow time for developing consensus. Having someone in charge was necessary for success. That was not the case for women individually gathering food, and would actually hurt efforts at raising children in cooperation with other women, the researchers say.
Yet again, hormones appear to be the tool of these evolutionary drives. For example, the hormone serotonin puts people into good moods. Serotonin levels are very high in dominant males, which may come from the sense of control, and/or may create that control because those males are "more relaxed and tolerant of others, thus allowing one to appear confident, calm, and in control." But women have lower levels of serotonin and in general are more anxious and fearful. Those feelings help in raising children because they make women prefer secure relationships, "increase mothers' empathy for children's suffering, and heighten maternal vigilance for children's safety." They would also be more fearful to help preserve themselves for their offspring, because children with a single parent do better statistically when that parent is the mother.
Men and women also differ in how they form subgroups or "coalitions" within larger groups. Women's coalitions tend to be long-lasting, more inclusive, and "more concerned with fairness and equalization of outcomes…" Strong females, for example, "give points to members who had weak bargaining positions," an action that didn't occur in any all-male group study that the authors reviewed. In early humans, men would have greater need of coalitions to dethrone leaders or at least keep the leader's power in check. Women did not need subgroups as much, since dominance was not an issue and reproductive success was not based as much on power as it was for men. Plus, when they did form subgroups, those were directed at activities that benefited from long-term cooperation, like, again, child-rearing.
Application: These differences would help explain why, despite forty years of advancement in female rights, education, and career equality in the developed world, the business and political worlds still tend to be dominated by males. But that doesn't mean these tendencies cannot be overcome, the authors say. Unfortunately, solutions have focused on individuals, such as training males to be more inclusive and females to be more assertive. But if individual behaviors are deeply affected by the gender makeup of groups, that makeup and how those groups interact need more attention. For example, merely having more females in management positions may not be as good an indicator of gender equality as the number of women in important decision-making groups. Having a female director of human resources doesn't mean as much for equality if the position does not have a seat on a company's strategic planning team (as is often the case).
Some of the authors' suggestions, due to legal considerations they acknowledge, will never happen in my opinion (like selecting all-female teams for certain kinds of decision-making). One of their suggestions that would work is to set rules ensuring everyone gets equal speaking time. In my meeting facilitation course, one of the rules I recommend is, "Five minutes per person per topic." This can be interpreted several ways depending on the needs of the group, but generally means that on everyday issues, no individual is allowed to speak more than five minutes at a time.
The more important point to take from this article, though, is the recognition that men do not dominate because they are "jerks" and women do not reach out to other group members because they are "weak." These stereotypes are unscientific and will not help teams improve. The individual training the authors mention can help, but in the meantime you can create team procedures that make these differences unimportant and provide other benefits. The "five-minute" rule not only limits dominance, it also forces a team to strike a balance between trying to get complete agreement from everyone and accepting a imperfect decision to move forward.
Source: Colarelli, M., J. Spranger, and R. Hechanova (06), "Women, Power, and Sex Composition in Small Groups: An Evolutionary Perspective," Journal of Organizational Behavior 27:163.
Study: As the use of peer ratings in performance appraisals becomes more widespread, researchers are looking at how to make those ratings more accurate by finding causes of rater bias. The latest such study looked at similarity in "social style," which uses a person's levels of assertiveness and responsiveness to others to categorize people as 1) analytical, 2) expressive, 3) amiable, or 4) drivers. The first two styles are considered opposites, as are the last two, while any other pair of styles is considered "adjacent."
Business professors Gary May and Lisa Gueldenzoph gave 196 undergraduate students in business communications courses tests to categorize them by social style. These students had already been placed on project teams balanced by grade point average (GPA), gender, ethnic background, major (specialization), and skill types. After studying managerial communication skills, the students produced work meant to simulate business projects that result in written reports and oral presentations. Afterward, each team member rated the other members on 10 behaviors identified by all the teams as important in the group work, such as:
The peer ratings were worth 33% of a student's project grade, so members were motivated to perform well and to be diligent in filling out the ratings.
People with the same social styles gave significantly higher ratings to each other than did people with opposite social styles. The ratings by people with adjacent styles fell in between. The GPA of the person rated, which the scientists used as an indicator of the person's actual ability and effort, had no effect in any of these groups. So, as has been found with other traits, similarity may have lead to inaccurate ratings of actual performance.
The "actual performance" is a key ingredient in this study, because apparent biases can sometimes reflect an underlying reality. For example, females tended to get higher ratings from other females. But males, too, rated females higher. And more to the point, females also had higher GPAs, so the peer ratings may have in fact measured performance accurately. Along those lines, white students got better ratings than minorities from both whites and minorities, and also had higher GPAs. And in case you think this suggests that the teachers at these schools were handing out biased grades, note that the universities involved are what in the U.S. are called "traditionally black" institutions—ones that prior to desegregation of white schools catered to minorities and whose student populations still have minority percentages higher than the general public.
Application: Much as I like the concept of the "360-degree" performance appraisal, I have mentioned in previous issues that I am very concerned about their accuracy and fairness in practice. This study adds to my concern, but the authors make some excellent suggestions for overcoming some of the problems. Quoting another researcher, they say raters can be taught about the kinds of errors that are made, such as clustering answers around the same number instead of focusing on each question separately. Raters should be fully familiarized with the scale before getting it, including what each item means and what is being tested. Finally, practice sessions can be run in which ratings are compared to the ratings provided by trained experts. The authors also suggest a fourth approach from another researcher, which is to teach teams how to observe behaviors through means such as "note-taking, diaries, and frequency counts."
Although I think the value of personality tests in improving teamwork is greatly overrated—especially by people who stand to make money based on those claims, or those who spend that money and feel the need to justify it—this is one example where it might come in handy as part of a larger program. Just making people aware of the range of styles on the team, and talking about the advantages each style brings to a team, might cause opposites to be more careful in their ratings.
Source: May, G., and L. Gueldenzoph (06), "The Effect of Social Style on Peer Evaluation Ratings in Project Teams," Journal of Business Communication 43(1):4.
Study: When team members are not clear about their roles relative to each other, team performance is known to suffer. A study of Canadian sports teams indicates the team members may suffer as well.
Professors of kinesiology (the study of body movement) at four universities had high school rugby and field hockey athletes complete questionnaires halfway through their seasons. The questions asked about the athletes' offensive and defensive roles, specifically: their responsibilities on the field; their expected behaviors; how their performance in their roles would be assessed; and the impact to the team of failing in their roles. They were also asked how satisfied they were with their roles, again for both offense and defense, with these questions:
Since a generally unhappy person would be expected to be less satisfied with their roles, the researchers tested the students on that as well. At the end of the season, a month later, they gave out the role satisfaction survey again. After factoring out the athlete's general happiness levels and their levels of role satisfaction at midseason, the researchers found that a lack of clarity about role responsibilities and behaviors reduced offensive role satisfaction further over the last half of the season. Confusion about responsibilities lowered defensive satisfaction as well. How many games the athlete played in or started had no effect on satisfaction, on average.
Application: I can't make strong recommendations for business teams based on a small study of athletes with an average age of 15, no matter how often we observe working adults who still act like teen-agers. But the findings are certainly consistent with my recommendations in The SuddenTeams Program® that you clearly define each role on your team. In a team charter I drafted a couple of weeks ago, I listed on the left side of a table each job title from the "project sponsor" to the line workers with the least involvement in the project. On the right side appeared bullet lists giving the responsibilities of each title. In two cases, I even stated what the role was not supposed to do. For example, I noted that the project manager would not be overseeing the daily activities of the other team members. My experience has been that this 15-minute exercise will cut down significantly on misunderstandings, duplicated work, and conflicts at the points where work is handed off from one role to another.
Source: Beauchamp, M., S. Bray, M. Eys, and A. Carron (05), "Multidimensional Role Ambiguity and Role Satisfaction: A Prospective Examination Using Interdependent Sport Teams," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35(12):2560.
All content in this newsletter, including the title, is: Copyright 2003-2006 by Jim Morgan dba TeamTrainers Consulting. All rights reserved.
"SuddenTeams" is a registered trademark (US Trademark #2,456,849) and "TeamTrainers" and "The Science of Teams" are trademarks of Jim Morgan dba TeamTrainers Consulting.
TeamTrainers Consulting makes no guarantee or warranty regarding the use of information in this newsletter by individuals not employed by or under contract to TeamTrainers Consulting and performing official TeamTrainers business.