Academic research on teams made easy

Teams are everywhere - in sport, business, families. We join teams, get selected into them, and are even born into them. We can love them, hate them, and feel a great sense of belonging or isolation as a result of them.

A Chinese expression is:
一个中国人– 一条龙；一群中国人– 一条虫.
Yi ge Zhongguoren—yi tiao long. Yi qun Zhongguoren—yi tiao chong.
A single Chinese person is a dragon; a group of Chinese people is a worm.

Somehow, a group of capable people can fail when depending on each other. So what drives teams, how do they work? Does happiness cause success, or the other way round? Do results improve morale, or does the level of morale determine success? Which is the cause and which is the effect?

This knowledge would help us plan interventions. The next three articles offer some research insight along with simple suggestions for improving your teams.

Morale and Group Well-being
Groups of people, whether they be collected as teams, families, or communities deliver great pleasure and meaning to their participants. Peterson, Park and Sweeney (2009) propose morale is an indicator of group well-being, that we use it to measure how well teams are going. Morale was first used in the military as a way of managing soldier confidence levels. Demoralisation was used as a tactic to undermine an enemy army’s confidence. More positively, it can be used to develop the thinking, emotional and motivational energy of a team.
Morale’s value is, apart from feeling good in itself, that it promotes perseverance, resilience, sacrifice for the cause, courage and, of course, success.

Techniques to build and maintain morale involve anchoring the norms of the group around the recognition of strengths, and defining team challenges in optimistic terms (rather than cynical, unachievable terms). Somehow its often easier to find fault and predict failure, often to protect ourselves emotionally, or make ourselves look wiser - neither of which do anything to promote those benefits of morale listed above. It’s a subject familiar to us that has received very little academic verification.

Formulas for creating good Teams:
Which team is more likely to be successful – the team who likes each other or the team who respects each other? Prestwich and Lalljee (2009) researched rowing crews and found that while neither the presence of respect or of liking were able to predict success, successful teams put more value on respect than liking, when thinking back on their performance. A sense of belonging comes with liking, respect comes with achievements.

So at work, to associate yourself with success, provide awards for achievements and acknowledge skills. These things build respect for team members and indirectly strengthen inputs to produce better outputs. Social events and drinks after work are useful for building the liking, and thereby the sense of belonging. Both are useful. Don’t confuse a happy team with a successful team – they are created in different ways.

Forming Storming Norming Performing
If you are familiar with this model, you will have been told that successful teams pass through each stage consecutively in order to reach peak performance. That is, effective forming (commencement) produces effective storming (idea generation and leadership) which produces effective norming (decision-making), which produces effective performance outcomes – a linear progression.

Accordingly then, group strengthening may come through facilitated discussion, decision-models and so on.
Fullagar and Egleston (2009) studied ten 4-person teams in an air traffic control simulator, and learned that group performance predicts group cohesiveness, and not the other way round. This suggests the model is more iterative, self-reinforcing and not so linear.

When building cohesiveness in a new team, add small projects in the beginning to create a mini-portfolio of success, or make a big thing of their early successes. This will in turn improve the quality of the storming and norming for future projects.
It also highlights the value of a fifth phase - adjourning/mourning - where a team’s efforts are effectively debriefed at the end of a cycle. The performance-to-cohesiveness link, dare I say it, sounds like “learning”. People need it and so do teams. Help teams learn by debriefing well.

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I run lots of workshops developing teamwork all over Asia, which include some theory supported by indoor and outdoor problem-solving challenges. The dynamics during these challenges are always interesting.

Their success is mediated by so many variables – leadership, morale, overcoming obstacles, amount of creativity, use of resources (people, time), personality balance, conflict, and so on. Some groups are slow to take off, then accelerate all the way to the finish, (pluck victory from the jaws of defeat). Some groups do well in the beginning and then stall (pluck defeat from the jaws of victory).
Helping teams prosper often involves getting back to basics. Its common for people to “know what’s wrong” but be unable to influence the team to change. Skillbiz can help.
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