Putting the I in Team
A challenge for white-collar professionals
I have said that a good job description says that “the position has the authority to ___ and is accountable for ___, which will be measured by ___.” But perhaps it is not that simple.
A lot of work is done in teams. The characteristic of team work is that the individuals involved have a choice about how much to contribute. This is a game. A cooperator will choose to make an appropriate contribution. A defector will try to obtain a share of the credit for the team’s work without making an appropriate contribution.
If managers do not find a way to influence workers’ behavior, there will be too many defectors to achieve the goals of the team. So this becomes a major issue in organizations.
One way to achieve cooperation is to try to hire people who are high in conscientiousness. That means looking for signs of this trait in the people that you hire. A possible explanation for the college wage premium is that graduating from college is a reliable signal that the individual is high in conscientiousness.
Another way to achieve cooperation is to bind workers to the mission. Workers who believe that the organization’s mission is important to society and who believe that their department’s mission is important to the organization will be less likely to defect.
Yet another way to achieve cooperation is to bind workers to their comrades. In the military, the members of a platoon may feel remote from the overall mission of the war, but they are likely to feel highly loyal to one another.
One risk of having a close group of comrades is that it may be difficult for outsiders to break in. The tightly-bound buddies may miss out on good workers who have superficial differences that set them apart from the team.
Yet another way to achieve cooperation is to foster team pride. A project manager might give her team a nickname (“we’re the Jets!”) or use group outings to try to inculcate team spirit. One risk of team pride is that it might motivate workers to give their task a higher priority than it deserves.
My approach is to make team cooperation an explicit metric in evaluating performance. In my high school classroom, I made it ten percent of the student’s grade. Students who were disruptive could lose points. Students who coached other students (as opposed to just giving them the answer) could gain points.
In order to put “team cooperation” into an employee’s performance evaluation, you need to specify examples. Constructive criticism should be rewarded, but chronic complaining should be penalized. Helping to orient new employees should be rewarded. Trying to make other employees look bad should be penalized. The more examples that you can specify in advance, the better. You don’t want your evaluation of “team cooperation” to seem like a purely subjective indicator of how much you like the employee.
There is a cliche that “There is no I in team.” Actually, the more that management can do to ensure that it is in the interest of employees to contribute to group work, the better an organization will function.
It occurred to me to write up these thoughts after reading Matthew Crawford’s essay on cubicle life. It seems to me that he experienced a lot of clumsy efforts at promoting team cooperation. My point is that not every effort has to be so clumsy.
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A crucial factor is whether the manager is in a position to discern individual contributions to team production. Sometimes it's this way, sometimes it's not.
For example, more often than not, college professors are not in a position to monitor individual contributions to team projects outside the classroom (take-home projects). Team production at a residential campus is complicated by the fact that various students differ in social status outside the classroom in ways that may unduly shape team dynamics. A potential remedy is to have students confidentially grade one another on their respective contributions. I'm not convinced.
By contrast, I suppose, in many settings in the firm, a manager interacts rather closely and continuously with teams, and might fairly discern and assess individual contributions to team production.
“…which will be measured by ___.” From my corporate experience, teamwork was measured and incentivized in performance reviews. Knowing that part of your evaluation was based on your interactions and helpfulness with others on your team did help drive desired behaviors (not always!). Even more important, however, as you point out, is hiring the right people. Part of the interview process was behavior oriented, asking questions such as, “Tell us about a time when you worked with a teammate that was difficult to get along with”, or “Describe the best team you ever worked as a part of, and how you contributed.” While not foolproof, these types of open-ended questions often were revealing about the candidates’ attitudes and experiences with others in working environments. Interviewer skills and diligence in follow-up discussion are also key.