Teams Blog

People in my line of work don’t want to admit there is little objective evidence team building works. Reports that it does come from people like me, and the people who pay people like me, all of whom have a vested interest in it working. Few team builders bother to create metrics proving a measurable change occurred, as I like to, and fewer customers are willing to pay for tracking those metrics. It has bothered me that I could not point to a study done by scientists with nothing to gain showing for sure that team development impacts team performance. Then I cam across a promising study title from last year: “Does Team Building Work?”

An army of scientists from the Univ. of Central Florida and the U.S. Army Research Institute said in their article in Small Group Research that recent study results were mixed at best, with many studies showing no impact. So they searched for every study of team building interventions that measured performance from a 47-year period. Using data from the 103 studies they found, the researchers state that teams which had performed team-building activities also had better processes, and their members felt better about their teams.  Performance was stronger, too, but the correlation was not as high. You can have better satisfaction and processes without having better measurable performance, obviously. Team building had a weak impact on the team’s thinking processes (cognition). The overall impact of team building was much stronger for teams with ten or more members, probably because they had more problems and thus more room for improvement. For the specific numbers and source information, see my study summary.

Team building aimed at setting team goals and clarifying roles was better than activities that tried to improve interpersonal relations or problem-solving. This is consistent with my observations, though I am biased. My services focus on the first two; teach problem-solving only in context of solving the team’s task issues; and only target interpersonal problems directly as a last resort. Fixing group dynamics eliminates most person-to-person issues while providing more bang for the team’s bucks.

All of that is good news for anyone tying to convince someone to do team building. But don’t get too excited. There are many limitations to this encouraging study. As best I can tell after rereading the same paragraphs five times, it does not differentiate between the games- and ropes-courses method of team building and approaches like mine that help team members agree on formal structures and processes. This disappointed me, since it won’t help prospects choose between these approaches.

The study does not prove that the team building activities caused the positive outcomes. In theory, it could be that teams with high performance are more likely to do team building, perhaps because their efficiency gives them more time for it. Or other factors might encourage both better team performance and more team building, and thus be the root causes. Based on my experience, I think that is part of the story, but those factors are not enough to create high-performance teamwork.

Then there’s the problem of the “intervention effect,” the teamwork equivalent of the placebo effect in medicine. Drug studies can’t just compare people who took a drug with those who didn’t. They have to compare those who took the drug with, for example, people who took a pill that looked like the drug but was made of plain sugar (a “placebo”). Usually the people given placebos do better than those who took nothing. If the drug takers did no better than the placebo takers, it’s back to the lab for the drug maker. By the same token, there is some evidence that doing anything for a team makes the team perform better for a while, perhaps because the employees are happy just to be noticed. Have everybody stand on their heads for a minute and they might report higher morale (until they get back to work).

Nonetheless, all of you with managers or employees (or clients) who refuse to do team building now have some solid ammunition from nearly 50 years of research. In my experience, resistors have experienced something like a team rafting trip that brought no lasting results back at work. Or they were forced to take personality tests that were helpful but only addressed a tiny part of the overall problems, problems that remained unaddressed. Team building works, the UCF research team says. You simply have to choose the kinds that directly target the problems you are facing.

Action Item: If you have been thinking about doing some team building, contact TeamTrainers for a diagnosis of the issues prompting the thoughts. If we can’t help you directly, we’ll know someone who can.

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.

I once shocked a manager by telling her I thought she had rated me too highly in an annual performance review. I don’t recall the details anymore, just the stunned look on her face. Some mistake I had made during the year, though I had identified and corrected it at the time, made me feel that my colleagues had done a better job on one measure. Almost everybody got a 3 on almost everything, so a 3 seemed unfair. When I self-rated, I gave myself a 2. I ended up with a 3 anyway.

My apologies if this comes across as self-aggrandizing, but it illustrates a point: The most common complaints I have heard over the years about appraisals boil down to, “It’s not fair!” Many teamwork scientists and management gurus agree. John Hunter of Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog reports J. Edwards Deming “emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work.” I’ve said for years that performance appraisals are legal protection for bad managers, a waste of time for the majority. If you set measurable standards for your employees, communicate monthly on the results, and praise and correct at every opportunity, an annual review tells the employee nothing new. If you don’t do those things, the review refocuses their effort way too late—perhaps 12 months too late. Though I offer recommendations in The SuddenTeams™ Program for harnessing appraisals to support team performance, that’s because appraisals are so prevalent, not because I like them.

Words like “fair” always cover a litany of traits, so I was intrigued when I came across a journal article defining the term, in effect. Two business professors, Richard Posthuma of the Univ. of Texas at El Paso and Michael Campion of Purdue Univ. started with a list of 1,000 possible sources and whittled it down to find 18 articles in peer-reviewed journals. From those they compiled a list of 20 best practices for performance reviews (PRs) that employees will consider fair. See the study summary for the complete list, but let’s discuss the ones most directly related to teams.

To ensure the team is focusing its efforts on the priorities of your company (or “nonprofit” or “agency”), I recommend having measurable standards that follow directly from measurable company goals. Some should be individual goals, and each team member should also have the team goals on his or her appraisal. Three of the best practices Posthuma and Campion found relate:

• “The PR should be based on observable job behaviors to the extent possible.”
• “Objective performance data should be considered to the extent possible.”
• “The PR should be aligned with organizational goals and objectives.”

They note in relation to another practice that at the start of the period covered by a review, “employees should have a good idea of what will be expected of them.” As an example of all of these, say a nonprofit helping ex-criminals break the crime cycle has a goal for the year to “Increase case closings by 20%.” The job placement team thus might create a goal of “Increase client placements by 20%,” and it follows that a placement counselor could have, “Place 20% more of my clients.”

You can make your whole HR process more efficient by having every employee draft their own job descriptions and negotiate them into final form with their supervisors. The method also lets you identify gaps between what managers expect and what people think the managers expect. Then use those descriptions as the basis for job ads, interviews, hiring decisions, reviews, and performance improvement plans if needed (to try to correct poor performance before firing someone). This alignment also reduces your odds of legal liability, according to employment law and HR experts. Posthuma and Campion list:

• “The content of the PR should be based on a job analysis or shown to be job related.”
• “Subject matter experts should have input on the factors to be evaluated in the PR.” They add that the best SMEs are people who are doing or have done the jobs.

I am, as regular readers know, a big advocate of employee empowerment. It is the most powerful method of improving a host of measures related to cost-effectiveness, worker and client satisfaction, etc. The professors say a best practice consistently shown to raise employee satisfaction is, “Employee participation should be allowed… in the PR process (e.g., setting goals, providing input on performance).”

Regular readers have also heard me say over and over that you cannot promote people into management without training them on how to lead people and yet expect them to succeed. Several of the appraisal best practices relate to training managers and employees on the process, and the former on how to provide feedback in a legal and respectful way. Most of us hate to give negative feedback, which is why I include that in my effective communication skills class.

If you want performance appraisals to matter to employees, then their appraisal of your appraisals has to matter. This study suggests there is a right way to review, and the professors say following it “should increase the acceptability of the information employees receive during their reviews, reduce the likelihood of complaints, and increase motivation…” If you’re a manager, that should increase your motivation to take the action below and use these “fair” practices.

Action Item: Print off the employee review process best practices and go through the list with your team. Ask members whether they think your process follows the practices, voting “yes” or “no” on each. On any in which many say “no,” work with the team to raise concerns with the “powers that be” in your organization. If you are the power that be, call me to talk about how to make things right: 919-414-8939.

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.

Finally: 500 sources.

When I started TeamTrainers ten years ago, I wanted to make sure I was only telling my clients what really worked. I’d attended some trainings on team development and read some books in the six years I’d been doing it at my work. Few spoke of actions I was finding most effective, and some of the suggestions seem really dubious based on what I had learned of small group psychology. So I fell back on my early career as a journalist and “hit the stacks.” Every week for six months, I spent a day in the libraries at the Univ. of New Mexico. In those days, I was able to go through a half-dozen articles a week, focusing on scientific studies, and a book every couple of weeks. I think I had around 350 sources when I finished the first draft of my training method, The SuddenTeams™ Program. Mind you, not all of my sources are scientific. I have to create practical applications from the science, and examples from the real world help me teach them.

After moving to Seattle, for three years I published an e-newsletter, hitting the Univ. of Washington libraries a full day once a month. TeamResearch News has morphed into a collection of study summaries arranged by topic on my Web site. Along with other sources picked up over time, I was over 450 sources when I restarted the business here in Raleigh. Now I walk to the library at North Carolina State Univ. once a month, but usually only half a Saturday. (Fortunately, it’s easier to find studies on the Internet these days.) With the typical human penchant for nice, round numbers, I yearned to top the 500 mark. With the personality and performance article I wrote up last week, I did it. You can download the bibliography (PDF) and count them if you like.

Most people seem impressed when they hear about my research into “The Science of Teams™,” but I have run into skepticism. A meeting of potential referral partners in Seattle fell apart when one person took an anti-science stance. Speaking as a former reporter, I put a chunk of the blame on the media. When they report on studies without putting them into the bigger context; or make one study appear to contradict the next by not reporting the different methods; and hype books by people on the fringe of scientific thought as if those theories have been proven, the average reader is understandably confused.

But science learns the same way you do: through trial and error. Scientists do this in a very controlled way, however. They eliminate other factors that could have caused the result they saw, and try the same test again with some slight changes to see if that makes a difference, and they invite others to try it. They pore through other scientists’ work to get ideas and avoid others’ mistakes. And when they’re done with their trial, they have to submit the report to an anonymous team of colleagues who critique the article, questioning the scientist’s methods and conclusions (hence the term “peer-reviewed journal”) . Then the journal editors take a crack.

Tiny differences in how studies are put together can cause very different findings. Over time, however, a trend will develop until most of the scientists in a particular field of study agree on some basic truths. Sometimes new evidence causes a huge shift in thinking. But more often, especially in the behavior sciences, consensus develops in a slow, methodical way over many years, and proves able to predict results. They’ll still call it a “theory” though, as in “the theory of gravity.” And there are always “outliers,” exceptions to the rule.

But the media do not report all this. There have been countless “shifts” reported that from a scientific standpoint are relatively minor. Whether you eat a lot or a little salt, or go on a high-fat diet to shed some pounds quickly, is almost irrelevant. The basic truths of nutritional science have held accurate through countless studies over decades. You have a much better chance of being healthier than the average person  if over the long term you:

• eat a variety of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables.
• limit your fat intake, especially saturated fats.
• eat no more calories than you expend through exercise and daily activity.

The same is true in teamwork science. Sometimes the latest fad or buzzword flies in the face of science, with no studies supporting it. It’s just an idea somebody has. These eventually disappear, but not before wasting some teams’ time, money, and goodwill. Other popular team building solutions are like diets: they might have a short-term, temporary effect, but as soon as you go off the diet/activity, the bigger, underlying issues are still there—and the pounds or problems return.

Winston Churchill famously wrote, “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Scientists make mistakes, have egos, hang onto theories longer than they should, and otherwise show the same foibles as the rest of us. I rejected at least 100 studies for various reasons, including my belief that some were poor science. But scientists follow a process, the scientific method, and subject themselves to checks and balances the rest of us would find highly irritating, for a simple reason: they want the truth.

I’ll take that over some consultant pushing his or her latest Big Idea, or popular but unproven practices, any day. And today, I have 500 reasons supporting me.

Action Item: Test one of your beliefs about leading or being on teams. Check out the list at TeamResearch News for short study summaries on the topic, or contact me.

The trend toward pre-employment personality testing concerns me for various reasons I won’t rant about now, but one of the biggest is the spurious basis for the judgments drawn from these tests. Personality and performance are both so complex, any claim that you can predict the best personality for a given job is, at best, shaky.

First, you don’t just have to fit the tasks of the job, but also the personalities of the team (current personalities, that is), manager, and anyone else the worker will deal with regularly. As discussed in earlier posts, personality is situational: though I come up in tests as an introvert, correctly, I love making a living immersed in groups of people. Also, four researchers argued in the journal Group Dynamics, “there are specific, lower-level facets within the higher-level… traits that may have differing and even contradictory effects on team performance.” (I bet the same is true for individual performance.) For example, do extroverts help teams because they are assertive or because they are social? If you were hiring for a team that was too aggressive and thus not getting along well with other teams, an extrovert might or might not be a good addition depending on his or her specific subtraits. By the same token, there are many different ways to measure performance, the researchers point out. To use the test results accurately, you would have to match the specific subtraits to the specific type of performance you were looking for in a specific team within a specific environment—any piece of which could change the next day.

The article dates from 2006, but I found it last spring while researching my post on the Myers-Briggs test and think it has a lot for hiring managers and HR directors to consider. I am intrigued by the broad background of the researchers, with representatives from academia (Univ. of Central Florida), consulting, a nonprofit research organization, and the U.S. Army. They reviewed the results of studies linking personality to team performance and predict how specific traits will relate to various aspects of that performance.

By the way, consistent with my earlier series on the history of team building, there was a nearly 40-year gap in the research from 1959 to 1997. My point is, the personality/performance link does not have multiple decades of studies supporting it like other aspects of teamwork.

Here are the aspects they found in the literature and how they defined them (all are direct quotes):

• Adaptability—Team members use information from the task environment to adjust strategies through the use of flexibility, (changing) behavior, and reallocation of resources.
• Shared situational awareness—Team members develop shared knowledge of the team’s internal and external environment.
• Performance monitoring and feedback—Team members give, seek, and receive task-clarifying feedback.
• Team management—Team members direct and coordinate task activities, assign tasks, plan and organize, and motivate other team members.
• Interpersonal relations—Team members optimize interpersonal interactions by resolving conflicts, use of cooperation, and building morale.
• Coordination—Team members organize team resources, activities, and responses to ensure complete and timely completion of tasks.
• Communication—Team members exchange information efficiently.
• Decision making—Team members integrate or pool information, identify alternatives, select solutions, and evaluate consequences.

Out of 12 personality traits, the authors think only two will be positive for every aspect of performance: emotional stability and flexibility. When you understand that the two subtraits of the first one are “adjustment” and “self-esteem,” this makes sense. As the researchers say, “Given that those low on adjustment are prone to be distressed, upset, hostile, irritable, and nervous, they are not likely to excel in interpersonal or team settings.”  As for flexibility, a team that resists changing to new conditions clearly won’t perform as well as one that easily adapts. However, I think you can have too much of a good thing. Some teams are too quick to chase the latest gig or trend. I worked for a company that essentially failed because it leapt to meet every new customer request and spread itself too thin. And in a highly regulated industry like drug development, any flexing needs to be grounded within the restrictions placed on the team. In either case, having at least one “stick-in-the-mud” to serve as devil’s advocate would be helpful.

The authors think someone with a strong desire to achieve will also be good for a team, with the exception that a high achiever may not have the best interpersonal relations. (What if that person wanted to achieve at any cost?) No trait is absolutely negative, they think; dominance comes closest, with a mix of negative or neutral marks. A team with lots of dominant people would probably have difficulty making decisions, but those same people might monitor the team’s performance carefully, which could be a good thing.

The rest of the traits, the authors think to be a mixed bag. You might think people with high levels of affiliation (desire for personal connection) would be good for a team, and it probably would improve communication and interpersonal relations. But that trait could hurt the ability to lead, coordinate, or make decisions with team members, because those people can be more interested in socializing than getting work done.

All of this is only educated guessing, mind you. The critical point? These are predictions, results these very educated guessers think will prove true if studies are done on them. They are saying nobody knows what personality traits will help specific parts of team performance, which means nobody knows better than a team’s leaders and members what traits will help that team. Even then, being human, they may go for the traits they prefer rather than the ones they really need to perform better.

Action Item: Call me if you want to talk about how to cut through issues of personality by focusing on demonstrated character and agreed-upon behaviors instead, at 919-414-8939.

Source: Driskell, J., et al. (2006), “What Makes a Good Team Player? Personality and Team Effectiveness,” Group Dynamics 10(4):249.

Pay, you’ve no doubt heard, is not the top employee motivator. But money does play a major role in ways that fact hides, as shown by a 57-year-old model of human motivation that got more support from a new survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). By coincidence, the survey also supports a discussion comment I made recently on motivational quotations, but first we go to Abraham Maslow.

You have probably come across his famous Hierarchy of Needs triangle from 1943. Maslow’s point was that some human needs take priority over others in affecting our behavior, in this order:

1. Physiological—Food, water, air, etc.
2. Safety—Security, both physical and of resources.
3. Love/belonging—All varieties, including romantic and family.
4. Esteem—Confidence and respect.
5. Self-actualization—Morality and self-acceptance.

As I say in my persuasion class, if someone’s financial security is under threat, there’s no point in appealing to their self-esteem. Your listener is focused on how to keep the money flowing and won’t hear anything else until the threat is resolved.

When I speak at events, most audience members realize pay is not a primary motivator for most workers, consistently coming in around #5 in surveys. The SHRM report, “2010 Job Satisfaction Report: Investigating What Matters Most to Employees,” concurs. Employees surveyed for it ranked “Compensation/pay” at #6 among items considered “very important” to job satisfaction. (Satisfaction and motivation are not the same thing scientifically, but I think there is enough overlap to treat them that way for this purpose.) Money still played a big role, however. Number 1 on the list was “Job security,” #2 was “Benefits,” and #4 was “Organization’s financial stability.” The company’s money matters in each, and each speaks to the bottom levels of Maslow’s triangle, ensuring you have the basics of life. Studies into happiness find that money can, in fact, buy it if you aren’t getting enough to eat. Only after the typical person has enough to cover basic needs, plus a bit left over, does extra money lose a lot of its power to motivate.

In case you’re wondering, the Great Recession does not appear to have played a factor in the survey. The results for job security and benefits have been fairly consistent since the earliest results presented, from 2002. (“Financial stability” was a new item this year.)

The report actually covers two groups of people, which leads to my discussion comment. One is a scientific sample of workers, based on all U.S. households with telephones (probably landlines), a total of 606 respondents. The other asked the same questions of a random selection of SHRM members who appeared to be working outside of academia, with 589 respondents.* One big difference emerged in comparing these groups. The HR folks thought “Relationship with immediate supervisor” was going to come in at #1, with 72% saying it was “Very important.” But it came in #7 for employees, with 48%. “Communication between employees and senior management” came in #3 for HR professionals (65%), but #8 for employees (47%).

I understand why HR folks would think manager relations are more important than employees say they are. As a member of SHRM, I know these topics come up all the time. There’s nothing wrong with that: the results show these matters are very important to half the workforce. I just find it intriguing that the emphasis in HR-group presentations and related magazines cause HR reps to miss a critical fact. If people feel their basic needs are in jeopardy, they will put up with a bad boss and poor communications at least until the job market turns around. Those who aren’t confident about their chances in that market will stick around forever.

This can lead a bad boss to think everything is hunky-dory because nobody is quitting. I addressed this in a recent LinkedIn discussion focused on managers who use motivational quotes instead of solving the problems that are so demotivating. That creates a cynicism that makes later change efforts difficult. People think it’s the latest “feel-good” campaign and see no point in changing. As the first commenter, I gave an example from a study in which the rah-rah didn’t work, so the company went back and tackled its operational problems through training and coaching with marvelous results.

I won’t link to the discussion to protect the very nice person who defended the use of motivational quotes. She said she had been sending them out regularly at the behest of a former manager and had nothing but positive comments. When comments in the discussion turned a bit negative, I jumped back in to tell her I was sure that was true. Unfortunately, based on my experience with teams, I told her I could almost guarantee the percentage of people who hated them was nearly as large as the supporters, and another bunch of recipients ignored them, some with annoyance. In addition to the genuine supporters, many of the nonsupporters would say positive things either for reasons of office politics or because they knew her intentions were good. The only way to know people’s true opinions would be to conduct an anonymous employee survey, I said (or arrange anonymous interviews, I could have added).

As illustrated by the SHRM survey, when I assess new clients’ teamwork, management and HR is often shocked by what I learn. Whether you are trying to raise productivity or morale, you are probably using the wrong methods unless you have a means of getting objective information about what matters to your employees. The most cost-effective way to fix that is to skip the surveys and let the employees solve the issue. Tell them what the problem is and why it is a problem; ask them for the solution; and pledge to help them put that solution in place—even if you have your doubts about it. They’re going to have to implement the solution anyway, and you don’t have to motivate them when it’s their solution.

Action Item: If you aren’t organized to support this cost-effective style of empowerment, contact me today to learn the details or get started.

*For my fellow statistics geeks, confidence level was reported at 96% with a margin of error around 4%.

Researchers have been looking into manufacturing, supply chain, and project management for years, often making recommendations to managers. Maybe you have followed their advice on the job. But there’s a problem, according to professors Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano: “Most formal analytical models in operations management (OM) assume that the agents who participate in operating systems or processes—as decision makers, problem solvers, implementers, workers, or customers—are either fully rational or can be induced to behave rationally.” In other words, scientific theories about how to run a plant or project assume that people:

• identify and react only to relevant information;
• have the same preferences in every situation;
• consider all options before making a decision; and
• make those decisions without emotion.

Oh, yeah, sounds like every workplace I’ve been in.

Gino, of the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill but headed to Harvard Univ., and Pisano of Harvard, point out in a 2008 paper that people effects on a  system’s performance have permeated other fields of research, from economics and accounting to the law. But “a ‘behavioral perspective’ has largely been absent in the field of operations,” they write. Because of this, current OM models can’t really explain the difference between one firm’s performance and another’s. In turn, managers don’t find OM theories very useful. Especially relevant to Teams Blog is the authors’ point that “behavioral operations” researchers needs to look into how individual cognition and “social norms and systems affect operations.” Gino and Pisano say based on previous research (cited below) that this will lead to very different predictions about what will fix specific issues.

In an interview I asked Gino, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, why OM scientists resist research on the effect of human behavior. She said there is “skepticism from some people that maybe it is not dramatic or very significant…” She noted that her co-author’s interest was sparked by going into organizations and seeing what worked, which suggests that other academics have not done that. However, she said, “The researchers, the more they hear, the more they understand that it is important to study the psychology of people.”

People effects have explained results that defied scientific theories in other fields. In the OM world, this could explain “the tendency of projects to run late and over budget or the tendency of organizations to over commit their R&D resources,” the article says. Researchers have identified many biases and questionable rules-of-thumb that affect our decision-making. Gino and Pisano provide a somewhat depressing list of 19 shortcuts humans take in their decision-making that can mess up the results. Some include:

• “Information avoidance—People’s tendency to avoid information that might cause mental discomfort…”
• “Confirmation bias—People’s tendency to seek information consistent with their own views or hypotheses”
• “Law of small numbers—People’s tendency to consider small samples as representative of the (entire) populations from which they are drawn”
• “Sunk costs fallacy—People’s tendency to pay attention to information about costs that have already been incurred and that cannot be recovered… when making current decisions”
• “Conservatism—People’s failure to update their opinions or beliefs when they receive new information…”
• “Hindsight bias—People’s tendency to think of events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place”

Take another example the professors explore, the “anchoring and adjustment” bias. People often start their thinking from a particular point, sometimes without a good reason for it, and then stay too close to that point. In one study, software developers given a higher anchor to start with ended up with higher final estimates than when they were given lower or no “anchors,” the article says. Sales forecasts are often off because they start with the previous year’s sales instead of an unbiased analysis of this year’s market.

Of course, behavioral operations researchers and managers can’t erase human bias. However, Gino and Pisano write, “operating systems can be designed in such a way that systematic errors are eliminated, or at least their negative consequences reduced.”

I asked Gino what advice she would give, for instance, a chief operations officer whose IT planner tends to anchor too closely to industry averages. “First, you need to be aware of the bias, which is a very simple lesson, but it is hard to recognize,” she said. Have someone act as a devil’s advocate, she suggested, asking the planner to bring alternatives to the table and questions like, “How did you come up with this number?” I would add, based on something else she said, that you cannot push the person for a certain number and be surprised when it turns out wrong. In the IT scenario, don’t anchor yourself to industry averages if the planner offers good reasons not to.

While other scientists are catching up to Gino, Pisano and other… okay, I can’t resist calling them “BO researchers*” at least once… take a look at the biases table in the article and maybe you’ll find your own answers. Or call me and I’ll show you how to account for people effects in your operation.

Sources:

• Bendoly, E. (06), K. Donohue, and K. Schultz (06), “Behavior in Operations Management: Assessing Recent Findings and Revisiting Old Assumptions,” Journal of Operations Management 24(6):737.
• Boudreau, J., W. Hopp, J. McClain, and L.J. Thomas (03), “On the Interface Between Operations and Human Resources Management,” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 5(3):179.
• Gino, F., and G. Pisano (08), “Toward a Theory of Behavioral Operations,” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 10(4):676.

*BO is American slang for a person’s smell or “body odor.”

How team members “think, make decisions, plan, design, perceive, and remember”—in other words, how information is processed as a group—will clearly impact how the team performs.  But many managers focus on the outputs of the process instead of the process itself. For example, if they don’t like a plan, they will send it back with some changes and questions. When they have to go through this several times on every plan, they understandably become frustrated. Often, though, they will either yell at the team for whatever they perceive the problem to be or start doing the plans themselves. Instead, perhaps they should stop to look at the understanding the team has about what they are planning or the planning process itself.

It may have been Edwards Deming who first said the majority of what appear to be individual performance problems are actually process problems (I confess I didn’t record the source). The AntiClue blog has made the same point, and it’s one of performance consultant Don Clark’s main causes of performance problems (3/4 of which are mostly out of the individual’s control). Almost all process problems boil down to someone not having the information they needed when they needed it, if you include as “information” knowledge, skills, procedures, external decisions, etc. A study from last year confirms that managers need to pay much more attention to how their teams get, use, and store knowledge. Psychology professor Leslie DeChurch and management professor Jessica Mesmer-Magnus teamed up to draw relevant data from 65 studies into team cognition. The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines cognition as, “The mental process of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.” The professors describe it as including both “the nature of team member interaction” and “conditions that dynamically enable and underlie effective teamwork,” so it’s both a process and a group mental state. Psychologists Nancy Cooke and Jamie Gorman, the sources of the first quote in this post, put it succinctly: “team mind.”

Cognition is measured two ways. One compares the understanding of some topic across each pair of members on the team. For example, the similarity and accuracy between members A and B, B and C, and A and C are averaged to get a team cognition figure. The other way looks at the team’s overall view of some topic, measuring members A, B, and C together. The DeChurch/Mesmer-Magnus study looked at the ways these two approaches; the type of team (decision-making, action, and project teams); and other possible factors might affect the relationship between cognition and team performance. I won’t go into all the details, but it was clear that the more a team had a shared perception of its work, the better it performed. Though more true on subjective tests like ratings by managers, it also seemed to impact measurable performance. This appears to operate in part by improving work processes and member motivation, but a higher level of team mind by itself raised performance.

The authors suggest that managers pay attention to whether perceptions are shared among team members and in what ways. Cooke and Gorman use the example of a team that works with boilers, pumps, electronics, and motors. Everyone on the team could see a strong connection between all four of these in their work. In a more complementary kind of shared cognition, a couple of members might see connections between the first three items, while another set of members might only see a connection between pumps and motors. Between all the members, however, the team mind sees a connection of all four. In the latter scenario, you can surely see the potential for misunderstanding if those different views were not understood and respected. That is, complementary cognition is okay so long as the people who don’t see the pump/motor connection defer to those who do on matters affecting the motors.

Accuracy of cognition is also important. For example, say you work in a pharmaceutical plant where following a standard operating procedure (SOP) is required by government regulation. It’s not enough for one or two members to understand the SOP thoroughly. If the whole team doesn’t understand it, you increase the risk of a regulatory breach.

DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus make the interesting suggestion of performing job task analyses on the work the team does and then “structure important support systems (e.g., measurement, performance appraisal, and reward structures) to develop and shape the collective cognition needed for successful teamwork.” I was trained on job task analysis while working at Los Alamos. An outsider observes people while on the job to determine the steps they go through and thus the knowledge, skills, and information necessary to succeed at the job. That done, the researchers say, leadership and training would be likely methods to ensure the team develops the proper cognition.

Or “team mind,” as I think I’ll start calling it. That term makes for all kinds of punny opportunities:

Q. What kind of cognition does a group of soil scientists need?
A. A dirty mind.

Sources:

1. Cooke, N. J., & Gorman, J. C. (in press), “Assessment of Team Cognition.” In P. Karwowski (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors, 2nd Ed. Taylor & Francis Ltd.
2. DeChurch, L., and J. Mesmer-Magnus (2010), “The Cognitive Underpinnings of Effective Teamwork: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(1):32.

A study I just posted to TeamResearch News about HR practices points out the way scientists think a little differently than most of us, and thus why I put a lot more stock in what they have to say than in most writers of business stories in popular publications.

This study was based on something called the Workplace and Employment Survey (WES), which is sponsored by the Canadian government and which people are legally required to respond to. Right off the bat, this makes the study different. The response rate of around 96% is four times better than the typical response rate to surveys of roughly 25%. Scientists without government sanctions supporting them go to great lengths to make sure results are not too badly skewed due to those low response rates, and thus are similar to what they would have gotten had they reached everybody.

Scientists are also careful about drawing conclusions from their work. A major mistake most people make when reading about studies—including most journalists and consultants—is to confuse correlation with causation. Simply put, just because two data are linked, that doesn’t mean one caused the other. In the HR study, for example, higher levels of training at a workplace were linked to higher levels of people quitting. Is this because a better-trained worker has more skills they can use to get a job elsewhere, as the scientists suggest based on other research? Probably. But it also could be that companies with higher “quit rates” have to provide more training because they have to hire more people to backfill those positions. A simple correlation does not show whether the training came first or the quitting came first, and the article’s authors say that. (Their study design provides some evidence, though.)

Scientists will point out where their data are lacking. In this study, the authors point out the WES data is not very detailed. It is possible that classroom training leads to higher quit rates, but on-the-job training leads to lower ones. You can’t draw a conclusion about all training from this gross figure (gross as in “general,” not as in “yucky”).

Scientists also are pretty quick, at least in publications, to point out where they were wrong. In part this is because they know in peer-reviewed journals, where other anonymous scientists critique the articles before they are published, if the authors don’t admit they were wrong, the reviewers will tell them. In this study, some of the researchers’ hypotheses turned out to be wrong, and they state that.

Finally, scientists are careful to limit their conclusions to what they actually investigated and found. For example, these authors point out the study was only about voluntary turnover, and there are likely to be compelling reasons for a company to offer training despite it harming this one metric. (If you doubt that, I refer you to the powerful evidence in the book The Fifth Discipline.)

Contrast all this to stories in popular business publications. They are not usually reviewed by other experts on the topic before publication. They assert positions without offering hard data to back it up. Their language is imprecise. I recently commented on another writer’s blog that the best “practices” a post claimed for teams were not “practices” at all, but descriptions of well-performing teams.

These stories also make claims they can’t support. A press release that got coverage from a national professional organization estimated financial losses due to workers who avoid conflict at work. But when I contacted the firm that put out the study, they admitted the sample was just anybody who responded to an online poll, and the demographics showed that the respondents in no way represent the common worker. Sixty-seven percent were female, for example. Two-thirds worked in companies of 750 or more and 71 percent had college degrees. Most people work for smaller firms, and only around 25% of Americans have degrees. Yet the release claimed, “New research reveals employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid.” No, it doesn’t. It says workers who use the Internet and happened to see an ad for the survey and are interested enough to respond gave that as the average answer, which probably would not turn out to be accurate if an outside observer actually measured the time.

In short: reader beware.