One of the best-known teamwork researchers in the world, Dean Tjosvold, and two others surveyed the manager and two employees in each of 100 teams in Shanghai from a wide variety of organizations and industries. Each team's "reflexivity" was measured by how often the team reviewed its objectives, work processes and progress and tried to improve operations. To measure innovation, each manager was asked to rate the team on how actively it sought new skills or ways to apply existing skills to serve company needs.
Groups that reflected on their operations were more innovative than those that didn't. As to what caused greater reflexivity, teams whose members tended to compete with each other rather than cooperate were less likely to be reflective, as were (to a lesser degree) those who focused on their individual tasks—that is, who neither cooperated nor competed with other members. Although cooperation by itself (obviously) helps team performance, number-crunching of the survey results showed that reflection was what created the greater innovation.
In this study, the correlation between cooperation and innovation was only +0.12: positive, but not very strong. On the other hand, the direct link between cooperation and reflection was +0.53 (five times stronger), and from reflection to innovation was +0.33 (three times stronger). So the path from cooperation to reflection to innovation was much stronger than the one directly from cooperation to innovation. Only if greater cooperation led to greater reflection did it also lead to much greater innovation.
Even in a country like China where people are more culturally oriented to working toward the good of the group than are people in Western countries, "Teams that develop cooperative goals appear to be in a good position to reflect successfully on their internal workings so that they can continue to innovate," the authors write.
Source: Tjosvold, D., M. Tang, and M. West (04), "Reflexivity for Team Innovation in China," Group and Organization Management 29(5):540.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.