The basis of Western (read Greek) civilization is that one person can make a difference. The person-as-hero is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don’t really think about it much. Multinational companies in China work largely on the basis of this model, with a few adjustments for the local norm of communitarianism.

At the same time, we know that teams, and teamwork, can achieve great things, even if we sometimes  characterize teams as being as useful as a bicycle to a fish. Teams don’t always have a good reputation, but this I think is a spillover from committees and meetings, which have a well deserved bad reputation.

For those of us with a positive view of teams, we assume that a group of people can complement each other, and build something greater. This is still an individualistic interpretation, and it misses out on a lot of the dynamics in teams.

The Value of Others

Research work done back in the 1930s indicates that it is often not just the collective wisdom of the group that produces greater results in teams, but the energizing effect that the group has on the individual, and a resulting improvement in their contributions.

Just the presence of other people makes us perform better.

The name given to this phenomenon is social facilitation. It was thought that this worked right across the board, and could be applied to any situation where people were aware that someone else was watching them.

After a few decades of work it turned out that social facilitation worked well for simple tasks, or any task where the person has achieved unconscious competence ie. they are autonomous. The two effects that were thought to explain this were the audience effect and the co-action effect (competition).

For complex tasks exactly the opposite happens. The presence of other people in these situations causes the team member to inhibit. The task is difficult and some level of public failure, or incompetence, is a strong possibility. As a result the team member can become overly concerned with the opinions of other team members, and can choke.

Distraction & Conflict

Social facilitation went out of fashion until it was replaced by Drive Theory in the 1960s. This says that people are hard to read so team members don’t generally know what other team members are going to do in response to their actions.

Therefore, when we are aware that we are being watched, we become more highly stimulated, and our ‘dominant response’ for that situation comes to the fore. This dominant response is our default response, given the skills and personal assets at our disposal. If this response is the right one and the task is easy, then the team pressure increases performance. And vice-versa.

This worked well until a new theory, call distraction-conflict theory came along. It says that we have only a certain level of attention we can give to a task, and the audience competes for that attention with our cognitive processing. If the task is easy, or we are experts in doing it, then we get a jolt from the audience, and perform better.

When the task is difficult, for us, then we are overloaded and the audience becomes a distraction, and not a motivating force.

Theory & Application

Drive and distraction-conflict theory tell us that when choosing members of project teams we should make sure that they are competent in their area of specialization. Otherwise we take the risk that the team-related stress will cause them to perform less ably than their actual skill level; maybe even fail completely.

Project teams are not the place to train people, except perhaps when the staff member is just there as an observer.

The more important the team, and the more intense the scrutiny is likely to be, the more important the team members’ skill base becomes. So strategic teams should be manned with senior level staff only.

The members of these top teams should know each other well, and trust each other implicitly. They should be able to predict the likely responses of the other team members in most situations, and should be sufficiently open to be able to call for help when they need it.

Junior staff need to be put on teams where the teams members don’t have such a huge psychological investment in the outcome; where the outcome of the project is not critical to the company. Otherwise they may suffer stress-induced failure, especially when the other members of the team are of the opposite sex.

Managing teams is not a scheduling issue, but a full-time job for someone who understands the psychology of teams and team building.