Attitudes and Beliefs that Emerge from the Other Drivers
In 1996, a team attempted to ascend Mount Everest via the South Col route in Nepal. The expedition was led by two of the world’s most skilled and seasoned climbers, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, both of whom had successfully led prior expeditions to the top of Everest. The team also had four experienced guides, several skilled Sherpas, and 16 paying clients. Tragically, five of the climbers perished during the expedition—including the two team leaders. How could this have happened to such a skilled, “capable” team?
At the beginning of the mission, the leaders established a plan; they agreed they needed to reach the mountaintop by 2 pm, or they would turn back and abandon the climb. The agreement was, “No matter how close,” if they weren’t at the top by the designated time, they would begin their descent. But during the climb, the team fell behind schedule. When it became clear they wouldn’t reach the top by 2 pm, Rob Hall made the decision that they would continue. At that point, four of the team members chose to return to the base, but everyone else continued the climb. Many had serious reservations, yet they continued to climb. When a severe storm set in, visibility declined, and temperatures dropped. Climbers ran out of supplemental oxygen, became disoriented, and lost their bearings. During the decent, five died, and others barely survived.
While the ultimate cause of death for these climbers was likely asphyxiation or hypothermia, the underlying cause as we see it was a lack of “psychological safety,” or the belief that you can speak up, admit concerns, and offer a dissenting opinion.
Team members felt that they couldn’t speak up without being ostracized by the leader. They started to form this belief well before the climb. According to Jon Krakauer’s personal account of the expedition (as described in the book, Into Thin Air), Rob Hall, the mission leader, told the team before they began, “I will tolerate no dissension up there. My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don’t like a particular decision I make, I’d be happy to discuss it with you afterwards, not while we’re up on the hill.” He made it clear that they shouldn’t feel comfortable speaking up.
Hierarchical teams often struggle with psychological safety—less powerful team members feel they should do what they are told. The climbing team had a clear hierarchy: leaders, then guides, and then customers. There was even a hierarchy among the guides. One guide, who knew he was paid less than the others, felt his opinion wasn’t valued. He had serious concerns about proceeding beyond the designated turnback time, but he had learned to “not be argumentative.” He, like all but four members of the expedition, was afraid to offer an opposing point of view. The consequences were deadly.
This chapter is about cooperation, the term we use to describe the attitudes and beliefs that team members have about their team. These attitudes and beliefs are formed based on experiences with the team (and with previous teams), and they are influenced by team member capabilities and personalities, teamwork behaviors (or lack thereof), communications, conditions, shared understanding (or misunderstanding), and leadership. In other words, cooperation “emerges” from the other six drivers. And, in turn, cooperative attitudes and beliefs can help some of the other drivers.
Cooperative attitudes and beliefs are driven by perceptions, and perceptions don’t always match reality. That is why you can’t “make” someone trust you; you can only take actions that increase the likelihood that they perceive you as trustworthy. There are no guarantees, but taking the “right” actions improves your odds.
Cooperation is what psychologists refer to as an “emergent state,” which is simply a way of noting that it develops over time and is dynamic in nature. Cooperation isn’t like a skill or personality trait that you take with you from team to team. And it isn’t about your general attitude towards teamwork, but rather how you currently think and feel about this team. And those attitudes and beliefs can change over time. Do I believe this team can “win”? Is my team leader trustworthy? Is it acceptable to offer a dissenting point of view? Answers to those questions can change quite rapidly. And when you join a different team, a whole new set of attitudes and beliefs about that team will emerge over time.
The research is clear—four cooperative attitudes and beliefs can greatly influence team effectiveness, so it’s important to keep an eye on them (Table 5.1). You can think of these four as a form of warning system—when they decline, performance problems are likely to follow (or may have already started). If you take actions that boost them, there is a good chance performance will improve.
Table 5.1. Four Key Forms of Cooperation
| • Trust—Do I expect my teammates to do the right thing? Do I believe they have positive intentions? |
| • Psychological safety—Do I feel I can be genuine and openly share my perspective? Do I believe my teammates will give me the benefit of the doubt? |
| • Collective efficacy—Do we believe our team can “get it done”? Are we confident that our team will “win?” |
| • Cohesion—How do our team members feel about the team and our work? To what extent are we attracted or committed to the team and the task? |
Of course, people form many other attitudes and beliefs while on a team. But we focus on these four because there is clear evidence that that they make a meaningful difference. They are all backed by solid meta-analytic research results that indicate they drive teamwork and team effectiveness.
Thought Experiment. While reading this chapter on cooperation, ask:
An old Irish proverb says, “When mistrust comes in, loves goes out.” Everyone knows it is hard to maintain a happy, healthy personal relationship without trust. When we trust someone, we assume that they are operating with positive intent, we expect that they will do what they say, and we believe they have our best interests at heart. These beliefs allow us to accept some vulnerability and forego some personal control because we “trust” they will do the right thing.
While no one will say trust is unimportant at work, some people believe it is merely nice to have, that you can get by without high levels of trust if you hire smart, hard-working people and establish clear rules and consequences. But the research would suggest that they are wrong. Trust is a business imperative.
When team members trust one another (intrateam trust), they consistently demonstrate better team performance, even after accounting for how much they trust their leader and how effectively they performed in the past. This is based on a meta-analysis of 7,700 teams conducted by Bart DeJong and researchers from the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia. Their findings, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, were the same for temporary and for ongoing teams. But are there any situations where trust is particularly important?
DeJong and his colleagues found that trust was even more strongly related to performance in highly interdependent teams (those that fall on the high end of our reliance continuum), when authority is more centralized, and when team member skills are more dissimilar (on the low end of our similarity continuum). This all makes sense. If we rely on one another to get the job done, we must trust each other to provide help when needed. In a more centralized team, people with the authority to make decisions must trust the rest of the team to feed them accurate information, and individuals without that authority must trust that those in power will make decisions that benefit the team. And when team members possess dissimilar expertise, they must trust that their teammates know what they are doing and are making contributions, since they lack the expertise to readily assess if that’s true. DeJong et al. uncovered three situations where trust is particularly important, but they found that even in low reliance situations, when authority isn’t centralized, or when team members possess similar skills, trust is positively related to performance.
What about when team members work in different locations? Does proximity make a difference? DeJong’s meta-analysis suggests that trust is somewhat more important in virtual teams, but Christine Breuer and her colleagues also conducted a meta-analysis, and they didn’t find any differences. In the big scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter whether DeJong or Breuer is correct. What does matter is that they both confirmed that trust is needed in virtual and in co-located teams—so it is important to build and sustain trust in both settings. But because it can be more challenging to build trust when you don’t have the opportunity to physically interact with your teammates on a regular basis, we’d suggest that a little extra attention may be warranted when team members work at a distance.
We’ve been discussing trust within a team, between team members. What about trusting one’s team leader; does it matter if I believe that my leader will do what she says? The short answer is, Of course. You’ll hear more about this in the chapter on coaching, but for now, here’s a little evidence that trust in your leader matters. Employees who trust their leader perform better and are more committed to the organization according to a meta-analysis conducted by Kurt Dirks and Donald Ferrin. In addition, those employees are much more likely to go above and beyond their specified job duties—they are often better “corporate citizens.” And trusting one’s immediate team leader was more important than trusting senior leaders.
Tony Simmons showed how this translates into economic payoffs in an interesting study of 6,500 hotel employees. Simmons found that in hotels where employees believed their manager regularly followed through on commitments, profits were higher. His analysis showed that a one-eighth of a point improvement in a hotel’s “behavioral consistency” score (on a five-point scale) could be expected to boost a hotel’s profitability by 2.5% of revenues. That translated to more than $250,000 per year, per hotel. Trust is a business imperative.
Trust might be a little more important in certain circumstances, but the findings are quite robust—when it comes to team performance, trust matters in almost any team. What can the research tell us about how trust is formed? Why do we believe one person is more trustworthy than another?
Researchers have been contemplating this question for decades. Back in the mid-1990s, Roger Mayer and his colleagues developed an influential theory to address that question. Based on previous work, they proposed that perceived trustworthiness is a function of three judgments about the person. The first judgment is related to perceptions of capability (“can he do”), and the last two are related perceptions of character (“will he do”). The three judgments are as follows.
Do I believe this person:
• Is capable of doing what he said he would? (ability)
• Wants to do what is good for me? (benevolence)
• Adheres to an acceptable set of principles or values? (integrity)
Mayer thought that judgments about ability, benevolence, and integrity would determine whether someone is deemed trustworthy. While that sounds logical, does it reflect how trust really works? Fortunately, there’s a meta-analysis that can answer that question!
When Jason Colquitt, Brent Scott, and Jeff LePine were at the University of Florida, they meta-analyzed results from over 130 prior research samples to test Mayer’s theory. They found that, as Mayer proposed, all three factors play a significant role in determining who we trust, even after controlling for a variety of other possible explanations. When deciding whether to trust someone, the research suggests that you consider whether that person has the ability to deliver on their commitments. You might not trust someone to deliver, even though they have positive intentions, because you don’t believe they have the skills or authority to “make it so.” You also consider how they feel about you; do you think that they are truly going to look out for your best interests, and not just their own or the company’s interests? And you consider the person’s general character; for example, are they generally fair and do you believe they possess virtuous values.
In addition to those three judgments, Colquitt and his team considered another factor. If you ask your “trusting” Aunt Mabel (some might call her gullible) if you can borrow $20, will you get the same answer as the one you’d get from your cynical cousin Mitch who doesn’t seem to trust anyone? Aren’t some people simply more trusting than others? Could that explain why someone trusts you?
The research confirms that some individuals are generally more trusting than others. We learn whether to be trusting from our life experiences. Some psychologists refer to this inclination to be more or less trusting as “trust propensity” and consider it to be similar to other fairly stable personality traits like conscientiousness; people take their general propensity to trust with them wherever they go.
So what matters more, general trust propensity or our current judgments about a person’s ability, benevolence, and integrity? It turns out that both predict trust, but current judgments are stronger determinants. We bring our general propensity with us, but each interaction provides us with new information about the person, which we interpret, and that often overrules our initial tendencies.
Of course, when you first join a team, you only have your general trust propensity to guide you (and perhaps some stories you heard about your new teammates or leader). But as you interact with your team and you see how individuals behave, you begin to make judgments about the trustworthiness of your new colleagues. In essence, you are adding and subtracting points from each teammate’s trust score. You probably aren’t explicitly asking yourself, “Is she able to deliver on that” or “Do I trust her values,” but as a human you are naturally processing how much you can trust each person.
Judgments of trustworthiness don’t happen in isolation. Prior experiences influence the way people perceive and interpret new experiences. We filter and interpret new experiences through the lens of our prior experiences. Trust tends to beget trust, and distrust contributes to distrust. Here is an illustration.
We were providing consulting advice to several oil exploration and production teams in the Gulf of Mexico. Each team was made up of an offshore group and an onshore group. The offshore group worked on an oil platform in the Gulf, accessible only by helicopter. They lived in tight quarters, performed dangerous hands-on work, and handled the daily operations of the rig. The onshore support group worked in Houston and went home to their families after work. They were mostly white-collar experts in various engineering-related disciplines and they were there to support and at times guide the offshore team—the person with the most authority was located onshore. The company decided to set up an ongoing video connection between the control room on each rig and the meeting room of their respective teammates in Houston. Let’s examine how two teams who performed similar work but on different rigs responded to the new video capabilities.
Team 1’s response was very positive. They immediately used the video connection to engage in more frequent conversations with their onshore counterparts. Team 2’s response was far less positive. In fact, at first, Team 2’s offshore team members put an actual hard hat over the camera lens so Houston couldn’t watch them at work.
Based on past experiences, Team 1 had a high level of trust in the onshore leader and in their teammates in Houston. They had been getting good advice from them and felt that the onshore group was looking out for them. The way they interpreted the decision to add a video connection was, “Excellent. Now we have easier, faster access to Houston to get support and advice.” In contrast, Team 2 had a rockier relationship with their onshore counterparts. They felt that they were continually being evaluated by their colleagues onshore. They believed onshore was competent, but they didn’t think they shared common values. “Houston doesn’t understand the pressure we are under and the way work gets done out here. If they see us cursing and spitting, they’ll think we’re not being professional. We have enough problems to deal with without them judging how we look all day.”
The onshore leader of Team 1 was already viewed as trustworthy when the video concept was introduced, so the offshore group interpreted it as an additional means of support. The leader of Team 2 began with a negative trust score; therefore, the same action was viewed by that team as “big brother” will be watching.
Each interaction we have with teammates can add to or detract from our trust score with them. As we saw in the example, it is harder to make up a deficit than to operate with a surplus. And in all relationships, at work and at home, there are times when we need to spend a few trust chips, and so we should be looking for ways to build trustworthiness when possible.
As we noted before, because trust is based on perceptions and interpretations, you can’t “control” it, you can only “influence” it. Sometimes people will unfairly distrust you. Perhaps their perceptions are an inaccurate reflection of your intentions. Perhaps they view you as similar to a former teammate whom they didn’t trust. Or, if you are in a leadership role, sometimes an unpopular organizational action (e.g., a downsizing) will affect your team’s perceptions of you, even if you weren’t involved in the decision. You can’t make someone trust you, but you can act in a manner that increases the likelihood that they will.
• Monitor your “trust score.” Look for signs that indicate how much people trust you. Do they seek your input? Voice their concerns to you? Those are signs of trust. We all like to think that we are perceived as trustworthy, but be alert for signs to the contrary.
• Try to put yourself in their shoes. Avoid defaulting to what you believe a person “should” think. Ask yourself, How else might they interpret what I’m saying or doing—how might they perceive my ability, benevolence, and integrity? Their perceptions could be different than your intentions.
• Avoid making commitments you may not be able to keep. For example, if the final decision about a problem is outside your control, it is better to say that you will “look into it” rather than saying you will fix it. Failing to live up to commitments is a huge trust killer and is often perceived as a sign that you lack the ability to deliver.
• Own your mistakes. We all make mistakes. If you do something wrong, admit it and take responsibility for it. Be clear about what you will do going forward and then live up to those commitments. Admitting a mistake can make a contribution to the “character” element of your trustworthiness.
• Recognize that “trust but verify” doesn’t build trust. Ronald Reagan is often cited as evidence that “trust but verify” is a good way to operate. In some instances, that may be true. But recognize that each time you do that, you are sending the signal that you really don’t trust the person, which may adversely affect the way they perceive your benevolence. Of course, there are times when you must verify “the truth,” for example, when peoples’ safety may be at risk (“I’ll verify that my parachute is packed properly”). But if you verify every little thing, don’t expect to have many trust points in the bank when you need them later.
• Take an action that is clearly not in your best interest. Being perceived as selfish costs you points. In contrast, taking actions that are in the best interest of another person and not necessarily best for you shows that you care about them. That’s the definition of benevolence. Be honest—Do you do this enough or are you always angling so you “win?”
The second of the four key cooperative beliefs is psychological safety. Psychological safety is a big deal and not just when climbing a mountain.
Think about what we expect from most work teams. Of course, we need them to be productive, but given the dynamic, uncertain, and challenging nature of work, we also want teams to be adaptable, to learn, and to innovate. For that to happen, team members must be willing to speak up, offer their point of view, vocalize dissent, provide feedback, ask questions, and share expertise. They need to be open to try new ideas and ways of working, admit what they don’t know, seek feedback and assistance, and learn from mistakes. What do these behaviors have in common? They all involve some degree of personal risk. Telling your boss that you disagree with her involves risk. Admitting a mistake involves risk. Experimenting with a promising but unproven approach involves risk. No one wants to be seen as pushy, incompetent, or reckless. We don’t want our reputation to be tarnished. So most people are unwilling to take interpersonal risks at work unless they believe there is psychological safety. That’s why psychological safety is a big deal.
The concept of psychological safety was first introduced in the 1960s by two highly respected organizational scholars, Ed Schein and Warren Bennis. They proposed that psychological safety facilitates peoples’ willingness to learn and change. Amy Edmondson, a professor in the business school at Harvard University, has built upon and extended their work in meaningful ways. Edmondson is perhaps the world’s leading expert on psychological safety (and the author of book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth). She has used the term to describe the extent to which people perceive their work environment as conducive to taking interpersonal risks. In a psychologically safe work environment, people believe that they won’t be penalized, rejected, or thought less of when they demonstrate behaviors such as speaking up or asking for help. She has also done a nice job of distinguishing psychological safety from trust. She notes that trust is giving the other person the benefit of the doubt and psychological safety is believing that others will give you the benefit of the doubt.
We see psychological safety as the belief among team members that they can “be themselves” at work. It isn’t feeling that we are all friends; it’s not comradery. It isn’t safety in the sense that there is an absence of pressures—there can very well be pressure to deliver results on time. And it isn’t feeling secure that no one will ever disagree with you or provide you with feedback. It isn’t a license to be unprepared or to be a jerk. Instead, psychological safety is the belief that if we speak up, admit a weakness, or any of the other behaviors we previously noted, we won’t be judged harshly.
As you would imagine, working in a strong hierarchy can strain psychological safety. A study of over 5,000 mountain-climbing expeditions revealed that teams with more members from countries with strong hierarchical cultural values had higher mortality rates. Perceived hierarchical power differences can discourage people from speaking up.
It is normal to feel threatened or exposed when working with someone who is in a position of greater power than you. We witnessed this first-hand in a medical setting. We were helping train teamwork skills at a sophisticated simulation center where teams could practice handling surgical cases with realistic, state-of-the-art patient mannequins. One simulated case involved a normal hernia operation that morphed into an emergency situation when the patient started to show signs of a possible heart attack. Each team, made up of a surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurse, and scrub tech, needed to work together to save the patient. When the simulation was over, the team would huddle up and conduct a debrief of what happened. During one debrief, we asked the surgeon, who was the de facto team leader, if he had encouraged the team to speak up. He said, “I didn’t do anything to discourage them.” At that point the scrub tech asked if he could say something. He was the lowest ranking and least powerful person on the team. To his credit, he said the following:
Sir, with all due respect, we are scared of you and all the surgeons. When one of you shuts us down during a surgery, we probably won’t speak again for a month. Imagine that you just parked your car at the mall, and on the way in, you pass a person getting out of his car. You notice that his lights are on, so you gently say, “Excuse me you left your lights on.” If he responds, “They’re automatic lights, you idiot,” when you return to the mall tomorrow and notice someone else who left their headlights on, will you say anything? That’s why if you want us to speak up, you need to encourage us. Without that we probably won’t feel comfortable doing so.
Personally, we want everyone in the operating room to be willing to speak up and say, “Isn’t the procedure supposed to be on the patient’s left leg” or “Are you done using the sponge that is currently still in the patient’s body cavity?” Fortunately, the healthcare community has recognized the importance of psychological safety and the challenges of creating it in a hierarchical culture. And the good news is that they are making some progress in that area—although there is clearly room for further improvements.
You just read a story about psychological safety in the medical world, but a story is not evidence. What can team science tell us?
Lance Frazier from Creighton University and a team of four other researchers published a meta-analysis on the predictors and consequences of psychological safety. They analyzed the results from 136 prior research samples, based on data from almost 5,000 teams. As expected, they found that psychological safety is strongly related to task performance, information sharing, learning behaviors, and job satisfaction at both the individual and team level. In other words, psychological safety enables the types of behaviors teams need to demonstrate in dynamic, challenging environments. The impact of psychological safety is so strong that, even after controlling for personality, trust in leadership, work design, peer support, and job engagement, it predicted performance.
At every company, some teams outperform others. At Google around 2011 or so, it was viewed as a puzzle they needed to solve—and they decided to conduct their own study. The Google People Operations group, their equivalent of human resources, initiated an investigation around the question, “What makes a team effective at Google?” They had a few hypotheses. For example, they believed that assembling the right mix of team members, “one Rhodes scholar, two extroverts, etc.,” would yield a great team. They would just need to uncover the right recipe. They also thought that the best teams socialize and hang out together. So perhaps the way to solve the puzzle was to find the magic algorithm to create a strong team and then encourage them to hang out together to boost their sense of togetherness.
They launched Project Aristotle, which was code-named after Aristotle’s quote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” They assembled a research team of some of their best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers. Over a two-year period they interviewed more than 200 people and analyzed data from over 180 high- and low-performing teams, examined over 250 attributes, and tested over 30 different statistical models to explain what makes a team effective at Google. At first, the results weren’t clear cut. “At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,” project leader Abeer Dubey told the New York Times. “There weren’t strong patterns here.”
But they persevered and eventually figured it out. For starters, they concluded that at Google, certain factors did not predict team effectiveness. For example, working in the same location, levels of extroversion, seniority, team size, team member tenure, and even individual performance didn’t predict team effectiveness. Who was on the team was less important than how they worked together. We’d speculate that one reason for that finding is that Google is able to hire highly competent people, so very few of their teams suffered from talent gaps. It is likely that almost all their teams were composed of capable people. So, if team composition didn’t matter, what did?
The top predictor of team effectiveness at Google, by far, was psychological safety. Teams with higher psychological safety were rated as effective twice as often as other teams, and they brought in significantly more revenue. Members of those teams were also less likely to leave Google and more likely to tap into diverse ideas from teammates.
Prior research had already demonstrated the importance of psychological safety, but Google didn’t waste time reinventing the wheel. It was important for them to know what works in their culture. Local evidence carried a lot of weight for them. And it was also useful for them to clarify what didn’t matter—to dispel their local myths. Too often companies have “hypotheses” and then act on those hypotheses as if they are the truth, without any evidence. The Google-centric research effort allowed them to disconfirm some hypotheses and focus attention on a few key drivers. Going forward, they won’t be wasting their time pushing teams to “hang out” together a certain amount of time or finding an extravert to put on each team. Instead, they could focus on how their teams work together. Their research is driving evidence-based actions in their company; for example, they conducted scenario-based workshops to teach the behaviors that hurt and promote psychological safety. Their study makes us even more confident that psychological safety plays a central role in enabling team effectiveness.
Psychological safety is a key ingredient for team success, with one caveat. There are times when psychological safety makes it easier for unethical behavior to surface and spread. In a study of management students, Matthew Pearsall and Aleksander Ellis allowed teams to “self-evaluate” a piece of work, making it easy for them to cheat. Which teams cheated? It mainly occurred in teams with high levels of psychological safety. Of course, not all the high safety teams cheated, but when a team did cheat, someone was comfortable raising the possibility of doing so because they believed they wouldn’t be ostracized or turned in for bringing it up. And there is some evidence that when one person feels comfortable enough to act in an openly unethical way, others may start to feel that it is acceptable as well. Perhaps that is what happened at Enron in the early 2000s.
There can be a dark side to psychological safety. As you become more aware of the best ways to promote psychological safety, please use it for the forces of good and not evil! And as a team leader or team member, recognize that you don’t need to tolerate unethical, illegal, or immoral behavior in the name of maintaining psychological safety. When someone crosses the line, they need to be called out.
Two of the top predictors of psychological safety in Frazier’s meta-analysis were leadership behaviors and peer support (another was role clarity, which we will discuss in a later chapter.) The following are 10 tips that leaders and peers can adopt to promote a psychologically safe work environment for their team. Remember, you can’t make someone feel safe, but you can help create an environment of psychological safety.
• Thank people for offering their point of view—particularly when you disagree with them. It reinforces that speaking up is expected in your team and that it is safe to offer a dissenting view.
• Summarize what other people have said—convey that you “get it.” This tells teammates that you are listening to them and that their perspective matters.
• Be careful about your facial expressions. When you roll your eyes or look “pained,” your face may be conveying that the person is incompetent or pushy. That can not only shut her down but may squelch other team members too.
• Focus on “what’s right” not “who is right”—you don’t need to win every disagreement. It is easier to generate innovative ideas and engage in a creative discussion when you don’t feel like you must defend your position at all costs.
• Don’t tolerate a teammate saying disparaging things about another teammate. When a teammate is criticized behind their back, other teammates wonder, “Is anyone saying bad things about me too” and “Would my teammates stick up for me?”
• Admit that you don’t know something, don’t understand something, or made a mistake. When a leader does this, it makes it much easier for everyone else on the team to do so too.
• Keep an eye on how often team members speak up, voice dissent, provide feedback, ask questions, admit they don’t know something or made a mistake, seek assistance, and try out new ideas. These are the behaviors exhibited in psychologically safe teams, so consider this a pulse check. If your team isn’t doing these enough, then talk with team members one on one to find out why.
• Ask a team member to share his thoughts and opinions—and respond respectfully when he does. Some people, particularly junior team members, need encouragement to speak up. When they do so, the reaction they get will determine if they do so again.
• Be clear about nonnegotiables and negotiables—what can’t be changed and everything else where their input is valued. When the team knows which topics are “off limits” and which decisions can’t be changed, they are less likely to bring them up. And later, if you do need to redirect the discussion away from those issues, they will understand why you are doing so.
• Focus more attention on what can be learned from a mistake (“Do differently next time”) and less on assigning blame (“You really messed up this time”). A learning-oriented focus allows people to acknowledge their mistakes and ask questions without feeling threatened.
The third of the four key cooperative beliefs is “collective efficacy.” A useful way to understand collective efficacy is by comparing it to a few related concepts.
We’re all familiar with self-confidence. While psychologists sometimes debate its precise meaning, self-confidence can be thought of as a general personal belief in one’s capabilities and a general, transportable sense of self-worth. In contrast, self-efficacy is more specific. It is the belief that you can execute effectively in a specific situation to get desired results. Self-confidence is more general—I’m confident that I’ll be successful. Self-efficacy is specific to a task or situation—I believe I can get an A in this chemistry class. (See Table 5.2).
Table 5.2. Confidence and Efficacy Defined
| Self | Team | |
| Confidence (general) | Self-confidence: A general sense in my self-worth and overall belief in my capabilities | Team potency: A general belief that our team is capable—confidence in the team |
| Efficacy (specific) | Self-efficacy: A belief that I can perform a particular task well or handle a particular situation | Collective efficacy: A belief that our team can succeed in a particular task, mission, or situation |
There are parallels at the team level. Team potency is a term used to describe a team’s overall belief in their team’s capabilities. It is the equivalent of team confidence—“Our team is strong.” Collective efficacy is more specific, like self-efficacy. It is a shared belief among team members that the team can perform specific assignments well or can be effective in specific situations or contexts—“Our team is capable of completing this project on time and within budget.” Team potency and collective efficacy are shared beliefs, not simply an individual’s belief. It isn’t just that I have confidence in my team. It is that our team, collectively, shares that belief.
Over the years, we’ve interviewed people from teams in almost every major industry. In doing so, we’ve uncovered many teams made up of individuals with high self-efficacy (“I can do my job well”) but low collective efficacy (“I don’t believe my team can be very effective”). Unfortunately, if team members must rely on one another for the team to be successful, self-efficacy is insufficient. Teams with high self-efficacy and low collective-efficacy usually struggle to succeed.
As with trust and psychological safety, collective efficacy is a judgment based on perceptions and interpretations. It emerges based on experiences with team members and can fluctuate over time and across situations. At times, collective efficacy judgments may be artificially inflated (imagine a team full of narcissists!) or deflated, but even when they are inaccurate, they influence performance. All things being equal, a team’s probability of success is greater when they have higher collective efficacy. That doesn’t mean that a team that lacks key capabilities will be effective simply because they believe in themselves. But it does mean that they are likely to perform better than another team with the same capabilities and low collective efficacy.
Alexander Stajkovic, Dongseop Lee, and Anthony Nyberg conducted a meta-analysis of almost 100 studies based on data from over 6,000 groups. They examined the relationship between team potency, collective efficacy, and team performance. Team potency (general team confidence) and collective efficacy both predict team performance. But collective efficacy was the stronger predictor. The belief that “We’re good at this” is more powerful than the belief that “We’re good.” Both potency and efficacy matter, but efficacy matters more.
The meta-analysis also revealed that team potency typically operates through collective efficacy. In other words, general confidence in our team is useful because it can often help boost our team’s efficacy when a specific situation arises. But if potency doesn’t lead to efficacy—for example, if the specific challenge we face is clearly insurmountable—potency alone is unlikely to give our team an advantage.
Stajkovic’s meta-analysis, as well as one conducted by Stan Gully and his colleagues, confirmed that collective efficacy is more important in teams that are higher in interdependency. Think of it this way. When I’m working alone, I need self-efficacy. If I don’t believe I can do it, my probability of success is lower. When I’m on a team that mostly involves independent work but also some interdependent work, then self-efficacy is still quite important, but collective efficacy starts to matter a bit. As the degree of reliance increases, collective efficacy becomes increasingly important. Highly interdependent teams benefit from collective efficacy more than self-efficacy.
There is solid evidence that collective efficacy boosts team performance, but why? How does having a sense of efficacy improve performance? If you’ve ever taken a psychology class, you probably read about Albert Bandura from Stanford University. Among Bandura’s many accomplishments, he is considered one of earliest and most influential researchers and theoreticians in the area of self-efficacy. His work sparked a long line of research that helps reveal why efficacy matters and how it works. When efficacy is high, we are more likely to:
• View a difficult task as a challenge rather than an insurmountable obstacle.
• Exert more effort to learn and execute tasks.
Efficacy enables a team to feel they can exercise some control or influence over their environment. This feeling is often referred to as a sense of “agency.” When team members lack a sense of agency, they are far more likely to give up and less likely to exert effort and persevere.
Efficacy also helps a team be more resilient. A resilient team is able to withstand and recover from challenges, pressure, and stressors. Over the last several years, along with our colleagues George Alliger, Becky Beard, Chris Cerasoli, Deanna Kennedy, Jamie Levy, John Mathieu, and Travis Maynard, we’ve been studying team resilience for NASA and the US Army. Our research confirms the importance of team resilience and suggests that the relationship between resilience and performance grows stronger the longer a team works together. Team resilience is a function of the team’s capabilities (Does the team have ample skills, staffing, resources, sleep, etc. to handle challenges) and attitudes (Does the team believe it is ready to overcome challenges and bounce back if needed). Collective efficacy boosts performance in part, because it provides the “attitude” portion of the resilience recipe.
Collective efficacy can be a competitive advantage for a team because it boosts agency and team resilience. Here are a few ways to increase your team’s collective efficacy.
• Discuss and occasionally celebrate the team’s successes. If the focus of every discussion is on solving problems, the team can start to forget about their successes. Discussing successes can boost team potency and collective efficacy.
• When faced with a challenge, draw a line of sight between the current challenge and a time when the team overcame a somewhat similar challenge. The greater the similarity, the more this will boost collective efficacy (otherwise, it can still boost team potency).
• If you are the leader, take actions to improve or remove persistently low-performing team members. Try to help them to improve. If that doesn’t work, manage them out. When team members see poor performers on the team and no signs of improvement, collective efficacy drops precipitously.
• When the team’s capabilities have been improved, communicate that to the team. For example, when you acquire a better piece of equipment, get an infusion of capital, or add a team member with a key skill set, be sure the team understands how this tangible improvement can help them succeed.
• Focus attention on what the team can influence or control. When a team spends too much time discussing things they can’t influence or control, they lose their sense of agency and can develop learned helplessness. It is okay to allow a little time to “wallow” when something bad happens, but then switch the team’s attention to “what can we do about this.” Knowing there is a plan to remove obstacles creates a sense of agency.
• Engage in team debriefs that culminate with an agreement about how the team will handle similar challenges effectively in the future. This helps the team feel they can tackle future problems and speeds their recovery time.
The last of the four cooperative beliefs is cohesion. You can think of cohesion as a form of glue that induces a team to remain united.
Researchers acknowledge that cohesion is a bit more ambiguous than the other cooperative beliefs. Outside of the research realm, the term cohesion has been used to describe anything and everything related to teamwork. While there is some debate about what cohesion really means, most researchers agree that there are at least two components to it: social cohesion and task cohesion. Social cohesion refers to a shared interpersonal attachment among team members (but not in a creepy way!). Task cohesion is the belief that the work the team is performing is important, so team members feel committed to the task.
For example, at NASA almost every team has a strong sense of task commitment because they believe they are supporting an important mission. Some teams at NASA also have a sense of interpersonal attachment to their teammates, but as is the case in most organizations, social cohesion can vary greatly from team to team.
Daniel Beal, now a professor at Virginia Tech, conducted a meta-analysis with several other researchers. They found that both task and social cohesion were positively related to team performance, with task cohesion appearing to have a bit stronger influence. Two Canadian researchers, Francois Chiocchio and Helene Essiembre, reported similar results in their meta-analysis. The research also shows, as it did with the other cooperative beliefs, that the more team members must rely on one another, the more cohesion matters.
We want to alert you to a potential cohesion killer—fault lines. Researchers define a fault line as a hypothetical dividing line that splits a group into two or more subgroups. When team members identify more closely with some members of their team due to shared characteristics—age, gender, ethnicity, education, nationality, occupation, physical location—the stage is set for the formation of subgroups. For example, we worked with teams from a technology company that had teams made up of members from Israel and Asia. Those teams had three potential fault lines: cultural differences, geographic differences, and functional differences (engineering vs. customer service).
A fault line can be active or dormant. Dormant fault lines can be triggered to life by an event that makes it more visible and activates it. Table 5.3 provides a few other examples that we’ve observed.
Table 5.3. Examples of Fault Lines
| The Team Members Were . . . | Faultline Based On . . . | The Trigger That Made It Active |
| Doctors and other staff on a medical team | Education | A case where a nurse needed to speak up to an attending physician |
| Senior and junior officers on a military team | Authority | Where they are required to sit during meetings (who gets chairs with wheels) |
| Members of the company’s founding family and others | Family | A promotion decision |
| Younger and older members of a work team | Age | How technology should be used to communicate with one another |
| Project team members in the US and Europe | Geography | Deciding when to hold the weekly phone meeting |
The research suggests that fault lines are more likely to create problems when:
• There are strong perceived similarities among members within each subgroup and greater perceived differences between the subgroups.
• When the team is neither very large nor very small.
• When there are fewer subgroups (e.g., splitting into two subgroups is usually more detrimental than three).
• When team members are less open to experience and diversity of perspectives.
Almost all teams have potential fault lines. The goal is not to form homogenous teams—that will stifle creativity and lead to groupthink. Rather, the goal is to ensure that a diverse group of people don’t splinter into “in” and “out” subgroups but instead operate as a unified, cohesive team.
If you are concerned about potential fault lines in your team, what can you do if you are the team leader? Here are a few tips to consider based on the research and our experiences.
• When launching a team, start by focusing on what the team needs to do and accomplish collectively. An early focus on task requirements tends to emphasize commonalities and de-emphasize demographic differences.
• After task requirements and roles have been established, you can shift toward building and sustaining relationships
• Establish and emphasize shared goals that all team members can embrace.
• Use “connectors.” In this context a connector is someone who shares something in common with both groups (e.g., a salesperson who worked as an engineer in the past). Research shows that having even one connector can help reduce the detrimental effects of a fault line.
• Four cooperative beliefs consistently have an impact on team effectiveness: trust, psychological safety, collective efficacy, and cohesion. Keep an eye on them as they can serve as a form of early warning system. If you see signs that they might be dropping, take prompt action—particularly if your team members must rely on one another for the team to be successful.
• Cooperative beliefs are based on perceptions and interpretations, so they aren’t always an accurate reflection of reality. They emerge based on experiences with team members and can fluctuate over time and across situations. You can’t control other people’s beliefs, but you can take actions that may influence them in a positive way.
• Remember that people will judge your trustworthiness based on how they perceive your ability, benevolence, and integrity. Take actions that build your trust score (e.g., avoid making commitments you aren’t sure you can keep; do something that clearly isn’t in your own best interest). You’ll need those trust points later!
• Psychological safety is a big deal. Bad things happen when team members aren’t willing to speak up, admit mistakes, offer a dissenting view, seek feedback, etc. Psychological safety won’t happen by accident, so try to model the right behaviors.
• All things being equal, when team members believe the team can “get it done,” the team is more likely to succeed. So, don’t spend all your time focusing on problems. Be sure to allow some time to discuss successes and remind the team that they are capable.
• Be careful about potential fault lines that can fracture your team. To maintain unity and cohesion, when possible emphasize shared goals. And look for “connectors” on your team who can relate to and bridge the gap between two “subgroups.”