Teams Blog

Group members believe in using rewards instead of punishment to foster cooperation and will back that belief with money, according to a study on cooperation in groups I have summarized in TeamResearch News. If you use punishment instead, you are acting irrationally to your long-term harm within the team, the article suggests.

Psychology professors Toko Kiyonari and Pat Barclay put undergraduates in front of computers in groups of four, with no way to communicate with the other members or match people to the computer names they were given. They were told they could keep $5 Canadian or donate it to the group. The researchers would take the donated amount, double it, and split it. Each person was gambling on how to get the most money: by cooperating, or via the “Take the Money and Run” approach, as the Steve Miller Band would put it. The scientists called this “defecting” in the article, which actually reported on a series of three studies. Only then were the members told they would get to either reward (in some cases) or punish group members who had defected, if they wanted to. After that, they were given another option, of rewarding or punishing members who had rewarded or punished in the previous round.

As you would expect, most people given the choice punished defectors. However, even more people rewarded the first-round cooperators. In the third round, those who in the second round punished the first-round defectors did not get rewarded. Perhaps more interesting, people who chose not to punish defectors did not get punished themselves. Few took the attitude of “you’re either with us or against us,” in other words. Over all the studies, people who actively rewarded came out ahead financially, above punishers and people who neither rewarded nor punished.

Let’s put this in business terms. Say you and I are on an Inside Sales Team. The team decides that any member approached by the Outside Sales Team for help should drop everything and do it, because we need a better relationship with that team. Maybe we’re trying to get the Marketing Team to make a change and want Outside support (there’s a pun there). Say we then find out two of our eight members refused to go along, telling Outside members to go… “sell” themselves when they asked for help. In the next team meeting, two members yell at the defectors, two more opt to thank and praise members who cooperated with the Outside Team, and two say nothing. Later, when 360-degree performance appraisals go out, what happens?

These studies say most of the cooperators will ding the defectors on their teamwork and give higher ratings to the cooperators, obviously. But most of the team will also downgrade the people who yelled in the team meeting and upgrade those who used praise instead. Those who sat quietly will not get downgraded, however. More research is needed, as the scientific cliché goes. After all, if you try to stay mutual friends with people who are divorcing, often you will be forced to make a choice by one person or the other and cut off if you refuse.

The article (see the summary for the source) nonetheless shows the relative “rightness” of using reward instead of punishment when trying to build cooperation in a group. Subconsciously, it’s what people expect. This leads to some interesting guesswork as to why people still resort to punishment if we have evolved to rely more on rewards.  “By demonstrating that one experiences anger toward defectors and that one will irrationally punish them… punishers demonstrate that it is not in others’ best interests to defect on the punisher,” the professors point out.

In the summary I call this the “bully explanation.” We know from repeated studies that people usually quit due to their managers, not their employers. Yet bad managers persist, and companies refuse to do anything about them until too late. Sounds irrational to me.

Action Item:  Whether you are a team manager or member, the next time you feel like punishing someone for not cooperating, instead go into your next team meeting with them present and praise everyone who cooperated. The person will likely get the message, and you’ll build a better relationship with everyone else. If you would like details, or teamwork coaching to improve cooperation, let me know.