It Starts with the Right Expertise
Back in the day, the shorter of the two authors (five foot, seven inches on a good hair day) was on an intramural basketball team made up of graduate students and professors. We’d won our first two games and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We liked one another. We had no star players, but we were readily willing to share the ball without ego getting in the way. We were okay basketball players, good enough to win a few games to start the season. We were also older than all the other teams in the league, and we weren’t in the same shape as the other teams that were composed of 18- to 21-year old athletes. During warmups for our third game, we looked across the gym at the team we would be playing that day. They were dunking the ball during warm up drills and were jumping higher, shooting better, and moving faster during practice than we did during our games. On our side of the gym, a few of our players were “warming up” by smoking cigarettes (don’t judge; it was the 1980s!). While their team was dunking, our tallest player could just barely touch the rim with a running start. As Hall of Fame basketball coach Red Auerbach noted, “You can’t teach height.” We’d love to tell you a story of how our team used our superior “experience” and comradery to steal a hard-fought victory that day. But that would truly be a story. In reality, the game was pretty much over by the end of the first half. We simply lacked the talent to perform at a level that matched our competition.
This chapter covers capability, by which we mean the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes that team members possess, such as personality. We’re not talking about team member attitudes such as motivation or trust that can wax and wane quite suddenly. We focus on those in the chapter on cooperation. In this chapter we are talking about fairly stable competencies and predispositions, in particular those that have been shown to consistently contribute to or detract from team effectiveness.
When you form a team, you bring together people who possess certain capabilities, and if you choose to, you can further develop your team’s capabilities through training, feedback, experience, and coaching. While high capability levels don’t guarantee team effectiveness, a lack of capability hurts team effectiveness, and a significant dearth of talent (like having short and slow players on our basketball team) can assure failure. But the effect isn’t always linear—adding capability won’t always translate into better performance. Let’s see what the research can tell us about how capability influences team effectiveness.
Thought Experiment. While reading this chapter on capabilities:
• What are the current strengths and limitations of your team with regard to capabilities? Are your gaps more about task-related or teamwork-related capabilities?
• Would it be worth trying to boost your team’s capabilities? If so, what capabilities will you focus on?
• How might you boost capabilities? Training? Changing team membership?
It can be helpful to think about team member capabilities as falling into two main categories: task-related capabilities that individuals must possess to be able to perform their work assignments (e.g., the ability to program in JavaScript), and teamwork-related capabilities that people need to work and collaborate effectively with one another and that make someone a better teammate (e.g., communication skills). Let’s look at task capabilities first.
Not everything that appears obvious is true. But we’ll start with an obvious and, in this case, true statement: on average, teams composed of individuals with greater expertise in the tasks they are expected to execute will typically outperform teams with less expertise. We know from research dating back to A. J. Lotka’s “inverse square law of productivity” in the 1920s (he studied chemical researchers) up through Herman Aguinis’s recent examinations of star performers that highly talented people can make great contributions. Task-related capabilities matter.
But, of course, we can’t specify a universally applicable set of task capabilities that every team must possess as, by definition, those requirements are contingent on the tasks the team needs to complete. A silicon chip manufacturing team at Intel performs different tasks than a potato chip manufacturing team at Frito-Lay, and as a result they need different task-related capabilities (although both teams may need to possess quality control skills). Fortunately, it is relatively easy to identify and specify task capability requirements in teams with high task consistency. For example, the task-related competencies needed to be an effective member of a lawn care team include mowing, trimming, planting, and fertilizing, along with customer service skills for those team members who interact with homeowners. However, in more dynamic settings with shifting or unpredictable requirements, for example, in many technology teams, it can be much more challenging to anticipate the task-related capabilities that will be needed next year.
But whether your team experiences high, low, or moderate task consistency, if it is truly lacking key task capabilities, you’ll need to do something—add or replace team members, provide additional training, or, in some cases, change the task to fit the team’s capabilities. In most cases, you can’t just magically “team” away a significant talent deficit.
While it is true that significant capability gaps are a problem and that teams with higher levels of task-related capabilities will usually demonstrate better performance, the research also reveals something less obvious, maybe even paradoxical. You can’t always boost a team’s performance simply by adding more talent or by bringing in another “star.” In fact, research has shown that you can have too many stars.
A team of researchers from France, the United States, and Amsterdam, explored the question, “Can a team have too many stars?” The researchers, led by Roderick Swaab, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, a well-respected global business school, proffered what they refer to as the “too-much-talent” hypothesis. Their hypothesis was based on the assumption that when a team has too many dominant individuals, it can lead to dysfunctional competition and jostling for status. Competing “stars” begin to focus undue attention on their own standing within the team to the detriment of the team. They expected teams with “too much talent” to have more unhealthy disputes, in some cases going so far as to overtly undermine one another.
There is a parallel to this phenomenon in the animal kingdom. When a chicken colony has too many dominant, high-producing chickens, overall egg production declines. Why? Due to intense conflicts. Alpha chickens will attempt to peck their rivals to death and sometimes succeed. This is a literal example of how a highly competitive “pecking order” can hurt performance! But are humans like chickens?
Before they conducted their studies, Swaab and his team proposed that the degree to which team members are interdependent was a key to understanding the “too-much-talent” phenomenon. They believed that when team members are fairly independent or only loosely reliant on one another, adding talent should yield better results ad infinitum. In contrast, when team members rely on one another and must coordinate to produce results, then there may be a maximum threshold for stars. Beyond that point, adding top talent would disrupt teamwork so much that it offsets any potential value associated with greater talent. They hypothesized that beyond the threshold, team performance would decline.
The researchers conducted a series of studies. First, they asked people what they believe about the relationship between talent and performance. They found that the general public sees a linear relationship between talent levels and team performance. In other words, people believe that more talent is always better for a team.
But the researchers wanted to examine their “too-much-talent” hypothesis empirically. To do so, they analyzed data from soccer teams (every national team that receives a FIFA ranking), basketball teams (10 years of data from NBA teams), and baseball teams (10 years of data from 30 major league teams). They identified the percentage of “elite” players on each team and compared that to the team’s win and loss record. Why did they pick those sports? The answer can be found in our reliance continuum. Soccer and basketball teams fall toward the interdependent end of that continuum, where team performance is highly contingent on teamwork. In contrast, a baseball team is toward the middle of the continuum. The researchers predicted that the “too-much-talent” effect would show up in soccer and basketball teams, but not in baseball teams.
What did they find? In soccer and basketball teams, the relationship between talent and team performance was positive and significant, just as the general public would have predicted. However, that relationship only held up to a point, beyond which performance flattened out (no gain from additional talent) and eventually turned downward (performance declined with additional talent). Basketball and soccer teams with the highest concentration of stars had poorer win–loss records than those with a mixed roster. The apparent inflection point or threshold was when approximately 60% of the team (give or take 10%) were “elite” players. Above that point, additional talent didn’t help and could even be detrimental!
But what about baseball teams, where half the game is performed individually (batting), and there are almost no instances when all nine players need to coordinate simultaneously? Baseball teams did not exhibit a similar threshold. The relationship between talent and performance was consistently positive—there was no apparent decline associated with adding another star player.
Collectively, the research tells us that talent matters—significant gaps in task-related capabilities can doom a team—but you can’t always boost a team’s performance simply by adding more stars. It is important to remember that capability is only one of the seven key drivers. Capability interacts with the other six drivers to determine team effectiveness. Margaret Peteraf, a professor of management at Dartmouth University, suggested that we can’t predict the productivity of a Nobel-prize winning scientist without considering the team of researchers around her and the conditions in which she is operating. And even a great actor can appear amateurish when his director, co-stars, stunt double and cinematographer don’t do their jobs well. So let’s examine some research that considers how task-related capabilities interact with conditions by turning from the world of sports to the high-priced world of investment analysts.
Investment analysts study industries, companies, and investment opportunities. They gather data, perform financial analyses, and offer insights and opinions that can influence very large financial decisions. They issue earnings forecasts, stock recommendations, and detailed company research reports. Star analysts are quite highly compensated. If you can predict when to buy a particular stock, avoid investing in a particular industry, or refrain from acquiring a failing company, you will be paid a great deal of money (top analysts at major investment banks make millions of dollars per year). If you are an investment analyst, making it into the top rankings in Institutional Investors magazine can help your career soar and if you happen to appear on the cover you become a celebrity—so get ready to do interviews for TV, cable, and newspapers! As a result, the industry is notorious for buying (aka “stealing”) top talent from competing firms. This mindset is not unique to the financial sector; it is also true for other knowledge intensive industries such as law, consulting, medicine, technology, and accounting. The prevailing wisdom is that you can readily import star talent. This thinking is often applied to sales and insurance professionals as well. You “acquire” them and their book of business, plug them in, and bingo, you’ve improved your company. Stars in these industries are often perceived as similar to free agents in baseball. Find a homerun hitter and sign him up, and your team is better. But keep in mind, investment analysts and those who work in professions such as medicine and consulting rarely work independently; they rely on those around them, the other members of the team, to produce results.
Boris Groysberg is a professor in the organizational behavior unit at the Harvard Business School and the author of Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance. He and his colleagues have been examining assumptions about star talent for several years. He, along with Linda Eling-Lee and Ashish Nanda, conducted a study that examined data from over 1,000 equity and fixed-income analysts across 78 firms over a period of nine years. This allowed them to examine a few key questions. What happens when a star analyst moves to a different firm? Can you just plug in a star and expect them to perform at the same high level?
The results were dramatic. They found that star analysts who switched employers exhibited an immediate decline in performance. On average, that decline lasted five years! But conditions played a critical role in their effectiveness. Analysts who moved to firms that provided similar levels of support as their prior employer only exhibited a two-year decline. And those who switched to firms with better conditions didn’t experience any decline. Moreover, when star analysts moved with other members of their team (e.g., junior and senior research analysts, institutional salespeople, or traders who specialize in the same sector)—in other words, when they brought their support network with them—they exhibited no performance decrements. Interestingly, it also appeared that female analysts fared better in their transition to a new employer than their male counterparts.
Groysberg’s research provides a clear picture of how conditions can greatly influence whether capabilities, even elite capabilities, translate into results. Several years ago, we also conducted a study of industry analyst teams for a well-known global company. Within the company, two types of team structures had emerged over time. Some analyst teams were configured with a clear star at the center. The star received all the publicity, and it was clear that the rest of the team was there to make the star successful—to be ranked as a top industry analyst. In contrast, other teams were configured in a more distributed manner. There was still a designated leader, but all the analysts on the team were expected to coordinate with one another, and they all were able to make visible contributions to the team’s success. Going into the research, senior leadership told us that they believed the star model was better and they had been looking to find more stars to build teams around. But to their surprise, our research found the opposite was true. By all indicators, including highly credible financial metrics, the star-centric teams did not perform as well as the other teams. The other teams demonstrated greater teamwork and that translated into better results.
The conclusion of our research is not that star-centric teams are bad but rather that talent alone doesn’t determine team effectiveness. Boris Groysberg and his colleagues demonstrated that conditions can greatly influence whether task-related capabilities translate into results, and our research suggested that teamwork does as well. Before we leave our examination of task-related capabilities, let’s quickly revisit one additional finding from the research on basketball teams.
As you’ll recall, basketball teams with too many stars underperformed teams with a mix of talent. That finding was true on average, but there were exceptions. The exception was that star-laden teams that were able to demonstrate high levels of teamwork and coordination overcame the “too-much-talent” problem and performed up to their talent level. While teamwork can’t overcome huge talent gaps, it may be able to overcome an overabundance of talent—if the stars are willing to flex their teamwork-related capabilities and not worry too much about who is the alpha chicken.
When team members are expected to collaborate with one another, even to a small extent, team members need to possess teamwork-related capabilities—knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes that enable them to work together as a team. In team environments, teamwork capabilities supplement task work capabilities. But which are more important, task work or teamwork capabilities? It depends. All teams need “ample” task work capabilities, and any team that needs to work together needs at least some teamwork capabilities. Both are important but their relative importance is based largely on where the team falls on the reliance continuum.
When team members rarely need to coordinate with or rely on one another, teamwork capabilities are less important. In such teams, there is little need to help or back up one another, so they can get by with less teamwork capabilities. But even in teams where work is performed fairly independently (e.g., many sales teams), a toxic teammate can poison the well and adversely affect team performance. In general, the more team members need to rely on teammates and actively help one another, the greater the need for teamwork capabilities. But every team needs a mix of both task-related and teamwork-related capabilities.
When considering the capabilities required in a team setting, we’ve found it can be helpful to think about them in a 2 × 2 competencies matrix, as shown in Table 4.1. We first developed this distinction in the 1990s, with our colleague Jan Cannon-Bowers, while we were examining team performance for the US Navy.
Table 4.1. Generic and Specific Teamwork Competencies
| Teammate Generic | Teammate Specific | |
| Task generic | Transportable team competencies: Useful in almost any team performing almost any tasks | Team-specific competencies: Useful for working with this team, regardless of the specific task |
| Task specific | Task-specific competencies: Applicable to performing required tasks regardless of who else is on the team | Situation-specific competencies: Applicable to working on a specific task with particular team members |
The matrix shows that some teamwork capabilities are applicable regardless of the task being performed or who else is on the team. For example, because almost every team experiences conflict on occasion, being skilled at conflict resolution is universally applicable. We refer to competencies such as conflict resolution skills as “transportable team competencies.” But other competencies are only applicable when performing a specific task (“task-specific”) or when working with a particular set of people (“teammate specific”). Finally, there are a few competencies that are only applicable when performing a particular task with a particular set of people (“situation specific team competencies”). We’ll focus primarily on transportable team competencies, as these apply to any team.
The research suggests that there are a few generic or transportable competencies that can influence team effectiveness in almost any team setting. Some of these are skills that can be trained or developed, while others are more stable attributes that are difficult to change. For example, personality traits and other personal attributes are not very malleable; it is difficult to change a person’s personality, so your one opportunity to address this is at the time of hire. If your organization relies on teams, you can attempt to hire people with the “right” personality traits or at a minimum try to screen out those with toxic personalities. It also makes sense to help your employees strengthen those teamwork skills that can be readily enhanced.
Transportable team competencies are useful in any team, but they are even more important in settings where:
• People frequently serve on more than one team at a time, because they can apply transportable competencies in all their teams.
• Team membership is dynamic (i.e., the team scores low on the membership stability continuum), because when teammates regularly change or teams are quickly formed and disbanded, it is hard to develop teammate specific competencies.
• Team tasks are dynamic and unpredictable (i.e., the team scores low on the task consistency continuum), because when task requirements are unpredictable it is more difficult to develop task specific competencies.
If these characteristics are common in your organization or business unit, it is particularly important to find ways to integrate the development of transportable teamwork skills into the various training and learning experiences you provide to your employees.
Most organizations would benefit from boosting their employees’ teamwork skills—and we encourage you to invest some effort in doing so. But we also want to emphasize the societal value of developing transportable, fundamental teamwork skills before people enter the workforce. We want to encourage educators to create opportunities for students to learn about and practice teamwork skills throughout their education, starting as children, through high school, and continuing into college and postcollege professional education. Currently, we are advising medical schools about how to foster the development of transportable teamwork competencies in their curricula, to supplement the development of task work skills (of course, doctors should learn how to diagnose a patient, but communication and leadership skills are also pretty important!). Healthcare work is increasingly performed in teams. Teamwork has a significant impact on patient care and safety, so wouldn’t it be great if new doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals entered the workforce with fundamental teamwork skills?
We’ll step off the soapbox now and continue our exploration of teamwork capabilities. What does the research tell us are the most important transportable teamwork capabilities? Five generic teamwork skills, two related types of teamwork knowledge, and a set of other attributes including personality make a meaningful difference.
If I learn to be a stronger listener and communicator, become more comfortable giving and receiving feedback, develop the capability to deal with conflict constructively, and strengthen my interpersonal skills, I will most assuredly be a more valuable member of my current team. I’ll also be more valuable on virtually any other team that I join in the future. The research would suggest that communicating, giving and receiving feedback, dealing with conflict, and interpersonal skills are foundational and transportable skills. Teams that have members who possess these skills are more likely to demonstrate effective teamwork behaviors and to develop cooperative teamwork attitudes such as trust. Later, we explore how these skills manifest themselves as behaviors and attitudes in the chapters on coordination and cooperation, respectively. In addition, because team members are increasingly asked to informally fulfill certain “leadership” functions, we would argue that there is merit in considering a few basic leadership skills as transportable team-related competencies. We’ll explore leadership further in the chapter on coaching. The following is a list of five key generic teamwork capabilities along with a few of the behaviors they enable:
• Communication skills to provide clear messages, ask effective questions, listen actively, and convey understanding.
• Feedback skills to observe and monitor performance, provide constructive feedback to others, encourage feedback from others, and interpret feedback received.
• Conflict skills to disagree productively, use constructive conflict styles, diagnose the cause of conflict situations, and defuse and work through conflicts and help others do so.
• Interpersonal skills to infer intent/emotions, convey empathy when appropriate, interpret nonverbal cues, regulate one’s own emotions, and influence/persuade others.
• Leadership skills to constructively hold others accountable, motivate, and encourage teammates; share expertise/teach others; and clarify expectations and priorities.
There is also some evidence that possessing general knowledge about teamwork, or what we refer to as teamwork savvy, is helpful.
Teamwork savvy is knowing what drives team effectiveness and knowing what good team members do.
Mike Campion from Purdue, Fred Morgesen from Michigan State, and Michael Stevens from Weber State University have been studying teams and teamwork knowledge for quite a while. One finding from their research is that teams that possess a greater understanding about teamwork outperform other teams. That seems logical. When an individual knows what really influences team effectiveness (the science of teamwork rather than “myths”), knows how to handle common situations that involve team dynamics, and is aware of what good teammates do, they are going to be more valuable on almost any team. That’s why everyone who works on a team should read this book!
There are a few other personal attributes that are typically related to team effectiveness across a wide range of tasks and with different teammates. For starters, team members need adequate cognitive ability not only to perform their tasks but also to acquire new knowledge and skills, to communicate effectively, and to contribute to effective team decision-making.
Cognitive ability refers to the capacity to perform higher mental processes of reasoning, recalling, understanding, and problem-solving. It doesn’t refer to what someone knows.
Rory Brown, the former president of the Bleacher Report, believes that as a leader, “If you are the smartest person in the room, you haven’t hired well.” In general, that may be true. But we’d say the key is that your team needs ample cognitive ability given the nature of the work they perform. Inadequate cognitive ability to do the job is a problem, but simply assembling a bunch of really, really smart people won’t guarantee team effectiveness.
The research also provides insights about a few relatively stable personal traits that enable people to be better teammates. One such trait is collective orientation.
Collective orientation is an underlying belief about working in teams. Individuals who are high in collective orientation typically prefer working in teams and think “team first.” They are generally predisposed to promote their team’s interests. In laymen’s terms, we might refer to them as “team players.”
Suzanne Bell is a professor at DePaul University and one of the leading researchers of team composition. Like us, she has studied how a team’s make-up influences their teamwork and performance. She has examined this in many settings, including teams at NASA, and we’ve had many interesting conversations with her. She conducted a meta-analysis of “team composition” effects from almost 90 previous studies. One of her findings was that teams with higher levels of collective orientation and preference for teamwork demonstrate higher levels of performance. Interestingly however, this relationship only occurred in studies conducted in real field settings, not in studies conducted in a laboratory. We think that may be because lab studies tend to be fairly short in duration, so there is less opportunity for people to use their collective orientation for the team’s benefit.
Other studies suggest that collective orientation benefits a team because it makes it easier to share information and to fill in for teammates. If I think “team first,” I’m more likely to share what I know and less likely to hoard information. I’m also more likely to step in to help a colleague in need. Naturally, collective orientation is more critical in teams where members rely on one another more heavily. When team members are predominantly independent contributors, then being respectful and civil may be adequate—and you don’t need high collective orientation to be civil.
In our consulting work, we have observed that it appears a team needs “enough” people with a collective orientation, but not every team member must be a strong team player. There is probably some lower threshold of collective orientation below which teams are more likely to struggle. We’d like to be able to tell you that magic number; but currently research isn’t available to specify the inflection point.
Because collective orientation is a relatively stable trait, the primary opportunity to address this is when you are choosing people for the team. It is hard to change someone’s fundamental beliefs about teams, at least in the short term, so it makes sense to assess the teamwork orientation of your job candidates. Keep in mind, however, that whether a trait such as collective orientation results in subsequent teamwork behaviors is greatly influenced by the other drivers. In our own research using the Team Role Orientation and Experience (TREO) tool, we found that people who are predisposed toward being a team player (i.e., who see themselves as someone who calms or motivates other team members and seeks to maintain a positive team environment) do in fact demonstrate more teamwork behaviors. However, that isn’t always the case. For example, if trust is low, roles are unclear, and the leader is viewed as selfish, even someone with a high level of collective orientation is unlikely to demonstrate a high degree of teamwork.
You may get the impression that collective orientation means subjugating yourself. It doesn’t. Collective orientation does not mean being saintly or selfless. Consider research conducted by Scott Gayton from the Australian Army and James Kehoe from the University of South Wales. They studied applicants for the prestigious Australian Army Special Forces. One of the top predictors of who would make it through the rigorous Special Forces training was having a preference for teamwork. Virtually all their recruits are personally driven, physically fit, and mentally tough, or else they wouldn’t be trying out for the Special Forces. These are not bashful, wilting violets. So, while there was no shortage of toughness and personal drive in the candidate pool, it was the trainees who were also team players who thrived. In fact, applicants who viewed themselves as “team workers” were 2.6 times more likely to make it through the training! We see a similar mix of individual excellence coupled with a strong teamwork orientation in NASA’s astronaut program. In the early days of space flight, the goal was to hire tough individuals with the “right stuff”; collective orientation wasn’t on the radar screen. Today, NASA fully understands and appreciates the powerful duality of individual excellence and team orientation.
You can find people who are high in collective orientation and are also great individual contributors, perhaps even “stars.” Smokey Robinson is one of the all-time greats of Motown and a musical legend, but behind the scenes he has consistently demonstrated his collective orientation. On Oprah Winfrey’s Master Class television show, he talked about his experiences at Motown. While each musical act (“team”) was competing for visibility and resources, he approached his work collaboratively. “It would be nothing for us to go into the studio and help one of our competitors with a song that they were working on, with an artist that we were working on,” Smokey says. “We all did that, for each other.” For example, he wrote one of his most famous songs, “My Girl,” specifically for the Temptations, not for his group, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. We believe he wasn’t the only one who cared deeply about the larger team at Motown, but we suspect that not everyone did. That isn’t a statement about Motown or the competitiveness of the music industry; it is simply a recognition that there are significant individual differences in collective orientation. It is highly unlikely that every artist and producer at Motown shared Smokey Robinson’s underlying beliefs about teamwork.
In addition to collective orientation, three other traits are often associated with heightened team effectiveness. One is adaptability. Given the rapid pace of change in most organizations, most teams experience change quite regularly, so team members typically need to be flexible and adaptive.
Two other traits to consider are conscientiousness and agreeableness. The most prevalent framework for understanding personality is referred to as the Big Five, and these are two of the Big Five. In general, these traits can be helpful in team settings, but unlike the skills we discussed earlier, more is not always better.
Adaptability is the willingness and ability to adjust to fit changed circumstances; being flexible rather than rigid.
Conscientiousness is a tendency to be dependable, organized, and dutiful. People with this trait typically prefer planned rather than spontaneous actions.
Agreeableness is the tendency to be trusting, helpful, and cooperative rather than highly competitive and suspicious of others.
You can see the benefit of having team members who are high on conscientiousness, as they tend to be quite reliable. But if the team needs to regularly adjust on the fly, and adaptability is essential, we’d be a little concerned if all members scored very high on conscientiousness.
It is also easy to see how having team members who score higher on agreeableness can facilitate teamwork, although we would speculate that if everyone scores extremely high on this trait, the team may lack constructive friction. The research suggests that simply knowing your team’s average agreeableness isn’t the key here. Based on Suzanne Bell’s meta-analysis, it appears that to understand the influence of agreeableness, we need to look at the person with the lowest score. If that person scores very low on this trait, they are likely to be a disruptive element.
While we should be looking to hire and promote people with desirable teamwork capabilities such as collective orientation and communication skills, it is also very important to know which attributes to avoid. Let’s switch our attention to the dark side of team capabilities.
Unfortunately, you’ve probably had the misfortune of being on a team with someone who is “toxic.” We suspect you know what we mean when we say toxic, but in case you don’t, Rebecca Bennett and Sandra Robinson conducted a series of studies on deviant behaviors in the workplace. They found seven common behaviors that are consistently considered to be deviant: making fun of someone, saying something hurtful, making an inappropriate ethnic or religious remark, cursing at someone, playing mean pranks, acting rudely, and publicly embarrassing someone. Toxic employees are prone to these behaviors. In addition, they notoriously withhold effort, are continually pessimistic, and let others know about their anxiety and irritation. Clearly you want to avoid hiring toxic employees, but how can you predict if someone will be toxic?
The work of Ernest O’Boyle, a researcher at the University of Iowa, can help. He and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 245 prior research samples that examined what has been referred to as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
Someone with a Machiavellian personality believes manipulation is effective and acceptable, has a cynical view of human nature, and possesses a moral outlook that places expediency above principle.
Narcissism is typified by an overinflated sense of self-worth, inaccurate beliefs about control and success, and a strong desire to have their self-love shared and reinforced by others. They typically see themselves as superior, even when others do not.
Characteristics associated with psychopathy are a lack of concern for others, high impulsivity, and a lack of remorse after harming others. They are often great “impression managers” and can be charismatic.
You may know someone who has exhibited some of these traits. Perhaps you’ve been exposed to Dark Triad personality traits in your company, or maybe you’ve seen a politician on the news who has shown these characteristics (feel free to pick a country and political party of choice; there seems to be plenty of exemplars from which to choose). If so, you have seen the Dark Triad in action. These personality traits are certainly annoying, but do they really make a difference? O’Boyle and his colleagues found that Machiavellianism and narcissism (and to a lesser extent psychopathy) were consistently associated with counterproductive behaviors at work. These folks aren’t just annoying; they are truly disruptive. So, as you think about assembling a team that possesses all the necessary task-related and teamwork-related capabilities to succeed, also give a little thought to the capabilities you really want to avoid—traits that can derail your team and make you miserable! Hiring and coddling team members with Dark Triad personality traits or extremely low levels of agreeableness can adversely affect the entire team, in part because their negative emotions can spread to others.
How can negative emotions spread? Through emotional contagion. Researchers across the globe have been studying whether emotional contagion is real and, if so, how it works. Emotional contagion is a term psychologists use to describe how one person can “catch the emotions” of another person, in a way that is analogous to catching a cold.
Workplace rudeness can spread. Even low-level negative emotions can be contagious, as shown in a series of studies by Trevor Foulk and his colleagues in the United States. Exposure to negative emotional expressions appears to activate different parts of the brain than exposure to positive expressions, according to Tokiko Harada from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences and a team of researchers from the School of Medicine at Nagoya University in Japan. To make matters worse, negative emotions can spread not only from person A to B, but person C can “catch” the emotion from person B, without ever seeing person A! Guillaume Dezecache and a team of researchers in Paris showed that negativity gets passed along more widely than we might anticipate. And if you are hopeful that exposure to positive emotions could help “cure” narcissists, we have disappointing news. People who are high in narcissism are less prone to emotional contagion, as seen in research by Anna Czarna and others, perhaps because narcissists are less empathic. Somewhat ironically, it appears that narcissists can infect you with their negative emotions, but are less likely to catch your positive ones!
These studies on emotional contagion are an interesting example of how scientists around the world are trying to understand an important psychological phenomena. Collectively, they reveal one of the ways that someone with a toxic personality can “infect” other team members. We encourage you to do your best to “quarantine” your team from people with Dark Triad characteristics as much as possible.
The following box contains a list of the 11 transportable team capabilities and provides a reminder about a few toxic traits. You’ll find a nice summary of these capabilities, along with some additional information about task- and team-specific competencies in the Tools section at the end of the book.
Summary: Transportable Team Capabilities
Fundamental skills: Giving/receiving feedback, communicating, conflict resolution, leadership, and interpersonal skills
Teamwork savvy: Understanding team dynamics and how to be a good teammate
Personal attributes: Cognitive ability (adequate), collective orientation (enough), adaptability (particularly in dynamic settings), conscientiousness (but not everyone must be high)
Toxic traits to avoid: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and very low levels of agreeableness
We wrap up this chapter on capabilities by providing a few brief thoughts about team profiles, followed by a few practical implications of this chapter.
It is easiest to think about capability as a purely individual attribute: Sarah knows how to program in Python, Lakshmi has strong financial skills, Bill knows how to speak Spanish, and Sophia is an excellent communicator. But to take appropriate actions to improve a team, you may also need to consider a team’s collective capabilities. How does the profile of current capabilities match up against the capabilities the team needs? Using a task-related competency example, if everyone on the team needs to speak fluent Spanish, but 30% of the team only possess basic skills, it doesn’t matter that most of the team members are fluent, or even that one team member is “world-class.” Unless some adjustments are made to the team’s capability (e.g., by training or changing members), the team is likely to struggle or fail.
Sometimes it is enough to have one expert in a given area, but in other cases a team’s performance can be better predicted by knowing the team’s average capability or by examining the capability of the weakest team member (remember the research about agreeableness). For example, how likely is an Olympic relay team to be victorious if a slow, five-foot, seven-inch author is running the anchor leg? There aren’t three people on the planet who are fast enough to make up for that!
Researchers have begun studying how a team’s profile of teamwork-related competencies affects teamwork and performance. Research led by our friend and long-term collaborator John Mathieu showed that a team’s profile can predict team performance beyond that accounted for by individual competency levels alone. As a result, he started using that thinking with student teams in the University of Connecticut’s MBA and Executive MBA programs. Students complete a TREO survey designed to assess each person’s own team role propensities, uncovering the type of team role they typically gravitate toward when on a team (e.g., challenger, organizer, doer, team builder, and innovator). John then assigns students to teams to optimize their team’s profile (e.g., ensuring a mix and not having too many challengers on the same team) and noticed that thoughtfully composed teams did much better than when he randomly assigned them to teams.
When you are going to add or replace a team member, consider the current mix of capabilities on the team and identify the gaps. On the task side, is there someone on the team who has the skills needed to fill in for a key team member? On the teamwork side, do you have enough people with a collective orientation? Enough team members who are conscientious and can be counted on to get things done? A team’s profile of capabilities matters!
• Make sure your team has sufficient task-related capabilities to perform their own jobs—while a team can overcome small deficiencies, if the gap is significant enough you won’t be able to magically “team” it away.
• Consider how important teamwork capabilities are for your team—these merit more attention if your team members must rely on and coordinate with one another to succeed.
• If your team operates in a highly dynamic environment, where task requirements change frequently, or people move quickly from team to team, focus attention on hiring people with solid, transportable teamwork competencies.
• Be sure your team has enough people with a collective orientation—not everyone must have this orientation, but you need enough.
• Avoid hiring people with toxic attributes—don’t be fooled by their charisma or apparent task capabilities. You won’t change their personality and they are rarely worth the trouble.
• Adding “elite” talent can help, but when the need for coordination is quite high, too many stars can hurt a team’s effectiveness.
• You may be better off building your own stars than hiring them, but if you hire one, consider having them bring other team members with them—or at least prepare the environment for their success; “plug and play” often won’t work with stars.
• Before you add someone to your team, give some thought to the current mix or profile of your team. What are the task- and/or teamwork-capability gaps you want to fill?