Teams Blog

I always hesitate to write about “duh findings,” study results making so much sense, you wonder why the scientists bothered. But I know why they bother. Sometimes the expected answer proves incorrect. Also, though the information makes sense when you think about it, without the study you never would have thought about it. Those thoughts can lead to new insights.

Two Univ. of Maryland researchers asked a simple question, also the title of their study article: “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up?” As they point out, “When employees speak up openly on work-related matters, they aid in the early detection of problems and opportunities… and help their work groups respond successfully to unexpected situations…”

Logically, workers who are the most central to your work processes are the ones you want to hear from most. They are the most likely to see problems in the workflow or differences in the way teammates do the same work, for better or worse. Business professors Vijaya Venkataramani and Subrahmaniam Tangirala came up with the idea of surveying people of the same bank in India (see my study summary). This eliminated a lot of the factors that could complicate an experiment’s results. Everyone was in the same country within a distinct culture; subject to the same corporate policies, procedures and culture; in similar-sized units; doing basically the same work as the other groups. The professors asked about positive voice behaviors, defined in another study as “emphasizing expression of constructive challenge intended to improve rather than merely criticize. Voice is making innovative suggestions for change and recommending modifications to standard procedures even when others disagree.”

The survey asked group members whom they interacted with most (“central employees”) and other questions about other members. Central employees were found to speak up more only if they were considered influential, which was affected by whether they were considered good at their jobs (duh!). Even then, they spoke up only if they identified with the team, as shown by agreeing with statements like, “When I talk about my [work group], I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they.’” The professors suggest that managers who want employees’ feedback should improve their job skills and build team spirit. I agree.

But, I ask, do managers really want their people to speak up? I hear about plenty who claim to, but in reality discourage critical input. This led me back to the library book stacks to look up the study mentioned above. Respected teamwork researchers Linn Van Dyne and Jeffrey LePine at Michigan State Univ. wanted to know if people really draw a distinction between actions that are part of the job and those that go beyond the call of duty. You may again be thinking “duh,” but at the time (1998) scientists had not tested the assumption. Van Dyne and LePine (gotta love that rhyme) looked at “in-role” behaviors versus two kinds of “extra-role behaviors,” helping behavior and those voice behaviors. They used survey items about each worker such as:

• In-Role
  • “fulfills the responsibilities specified in his/her job description.”
  • “meets performance expectations.”
• Helping
  • “volunteers to do things for this work group.”
  • “attends functions that help this work group.”
  • “helps others in this group learn about the work.”
• Voice
  • “develops and makes recommendations concerning issues that affect this work group.”
  • “speaks up and encourages others in this group to get involved in issues that affect the group.”
  • “speaks up in this group with ideas for new projects or changes in procedures.”

The researchers surveyed 95 work groups at 21 employers plus each group’s supervisor. Each person rated themselves and four peers, and the supervisor rated every member. Van Dyne and LePine also did something too few researchers do, testing twice over six months. This makes it more likely the result you see at Time 2 (T2) was caused by the factor tested at Time 1 (T1). Otherwise, you only know there was a link between one description of the subject and another, not which caused the other.

In the Van Dyne and LePine study, people reported as helpful and speaking up at T1 (and T2) were rated more highly by everyone at T2. The effect was small, only adding 3% over in-role ratings. But if your manager is deciding between giving you a 3 or a 4 on your annual appraisal, that’s enough to make the difference. And it didn’t hurt ratings, I’m pleased to see.

I know from other studies that teams fostering open debate perform better than ones where no one speaks up, and people seen as helpers get more help from their co-workers. So if you are a team member, it is worth your while to take on extra job duties (making yourself more central) and non-job duties, including speaking up in the ways described above. Since self-ratings on extra-role behavior had no link to supervisor performance ratings, you might ask an honest someone on the team whether they think you help and speak up appropriately. If you’re a team manager, this research adds yet another reason to provide ongoing training to improve your teams’ job skills and reinforce team identity. The monthly “team-building activity” is not what I mean. This has to be a daily effort involving your every interaction with the team.

One point the Maryland researchers missed, I think, is that making more workers “central” to the group’s efforts could encourage more positive voice behaviors. You can do this by providing more cross-training, so more people take on the critical roles as needed due to overload, absences, and people moving on. There are so many wins in that for you, them, and the company, I would run out of hyphens to describe the situation: “Win-win-win-win-…”

Action Item: Do some reading about how to build team identity, or contact me for suggestions.

Sources:

• Van Dyne, L., and J. LePine (1998), “Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity,” Academy of Management Journal 41(1):108.
• Venkataramani, V., and S. Tangirala (2010), “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up? An Examination of Mediating and Moderating Variables,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(3):582.

“Survey finds mostly grumps,” the headline said in the Raleigh News & Observer recently. According to a report by The Conference Board (the same organization that reports Consumer Confidence numbers every month), employee satisfaction is at its lowest level “in more than 22 years of studying the issue.” Only 45 percent said they were happy with their jobs, down from 61 percent back in 1987, according to the Board’s press release. The decline has occurred fairly steadily over time, so it’s not just related to the recession.

More than half of American workers don’t like their jobs. That is shocking to me, despite the sad stories I often hear as I network for my business. Money is part of the issue, with incomes falling and health insurance cutting discretionary finances further. But a major component is workers who don’t find their jobs interesting, a figure that dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 51 percent. In fact, the drop “crosses all four of the key drivers of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards,” the release said. (Money falls under that last category.) It also says the data indicates “the increasing dissatisfaction is not just a ‘survivor syndrome’ artifact of having co-workers and neighbors laid off in the recession,” quoting John Gibbons, program director of employee engagement research.

Among those under 25, only 37% like their jobs. Given that job satisfaction correlates strongly with the likelihood of someone staying in the job, this poses a direct threat to long-term organizational efficiency, dependent as that is on the transfer of corporate and industry knowledge from older to younger workers. If they don’t stick around, you can’t pass it along before older workers retire, as the Board notes.

A quote in the N&O (actually Associated Press) article caught my eye for obvious reasons, from a 26-year-old: “There is no sense of teamwork in most places anymore.” It’s one thing to hear a 56-year-old say “anymore,” but simply pitiful from someone that young. However, he is also right on the mark. Multiple studies report that a sense of teamwork is related positively to job satisfaction.

Along with team development, another answer is empowering employees to make more decisions about how they accomplish their work. Cross-training people to do each others’ jobs is an easy way to raise the “interestingness” of their work. Note that none of these tactics necessarily require an investment of much more than time: time to put teamwork best practices in place, train some managers, have people shadow each other, and maybe change some policies and procedures.

Why bother? In addition to the higher innovation and productivity of satisfied workers mentioned in the press release, I have seen it positively linked to higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, and higher motivation. Even in good times, money is not a Top 4 motivator for most employees (among those above a subsistence level of pay). At a time when companies can’t even offer that, low-cost alternatives like training and empowerment just makes that much more sense.

Note: The report was based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households. Neither the release nor the article report the data-quality specifics like margin of error, but the Board’s research is well respected. That said, I’d prefer to be reporting on the original report, but I ain’t paying $395 to do a blog post!

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I am working as a volunteer stagehand for the City Ballet of Raleigh production of The Nutcracker Suite, and it reminded me how I got started as a team leader. My undergraduate degree was in that kind of work from North Carolina School of the Arts (as it was called then), which may seem to have little to do with team coaching. But it was there I first led a team, ten students working as the lighting crew. Someone else designed the lighting, but as “master electrician” it was my job on “load-in” day to get the 120 or so lights hung where they belonged, connected to the right circuits, and the circuits connected to the right dimmers.

I planned that thing half to death. I led the team in preparing the lights, developed a process, and trained the members on it. As a result, we got the load-in done very quickly—one “techie” not on the crew said our time had to be “some kind of record.” Without knowing it, I had just become a project manager. The parallels between a show and a business project are obvious: each has a budget, schedule, and scope and quality requirements. Unlike a lot of projects, though, a show has a “hard deadline.” Most business projects that supposedly have such don’t really. If enough things go wrong, the deadline moves. But with a show, when the curtain is scheduled to go up, it has to go up.

Oddly, most shows I’ve been involved with did so without massive last-minute pushes. (Not all, of course—I recall loading out one show’s costumes the night of the final dress rehearsal after nearly pulling two all-nighters in a row to get done.) And conflicts break out, but most of the time they get smoothed over at least to the degree that everyone does their job professionally. I can’t say either of those positives applied to most of the business projects I have observed, even in mature companies. Techies and onstage performers alike are rightly known for their “whatever it takes” attitude, but the same is true of most of the team members I’ve worked with. Is the difference in show “project” success the clarity of the goal in putting on the show? The fact that roles and responsibilities (on- and offstage) are extremely well defined? How well understood the process and tasks are by everyone on the team, across all functions? The fact that everybody including the techies has a backup with the training to step in on a moment’s notice?

I’m not sure. But I am sure if your team had all those best practices in place, it would be performing a lot better than any of your competitors’ teams.

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