Figure 6.1. Cooperative behaviors and team effectiveness.
SA = situational awareness.
Scott was on a business trip that would last a few days longer than originally planned, so he needed to purchase clothing for the unexpected portion of the trip. Here’s what happened.
He went to the local Nordstrom store looking for socks, underwear, a few dress shirts, and a pair of pants. He started in the men’s underwear section. As he began to examine the underwear, a salesperson emerged. “Hello, my name is Sue. How may I assist you today?” Scott told her about his trip being extended and what he needed. Sue looked conspiratorially to her left and right and then in a low voice said, “You can purchase anything you want, but I must tell you that you are holding an old man’s brand of underwear. I think you would be much happier with a more modern style.” When he thanked her, she said, “I’ll start a collection of the things you are interested in, so you can keep your hands free while you shop. Let me show you where you can find some of the other items you’re looking for.” As he continued shopping, about 10 minutes later, another salesperson approached him. “Hi, I’m Stewart, I noticed you were working with Sue earlier. She is tied up with another client, so she told me what you were looking for. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve pulled a few items that I think might be of interest to you. Would you like to take a look at them?” Stewart continued, “I also checked with our tailor. Alterations normally take a few days, but once he heard your story, he assured me he could have any pants you select altered by the end of the day, and we could have them sent to your hotel.” In this example, Scott experienced seamless coordinated teamwork, with monitoring, back-up behavior, and adaptation clearly on display.
Let’s contrast that with a different shopping experience, which took place at a well-known, high-end store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Scott was looking for a nice suit. The salesman showed him several beautiful (and expensive) suits, but the one he really liked was too large, and they didn’t have his size in stock. The salesperson said, “We employ the most amazing tailors from Europe. They are magicians. Let me bring you to Antonio, he’s one of our best, and he’ll take some measurements, make some alterations, and your suit will look awesome.” Scott went to see Antonio. Almost immediately Antonio started shaking his head and mumbling under his breath. He was trying to be a good soldier, but it was clear that something was troubling him. Scott finally asked him, “Antonio, what’s wrong?” In heavily accented English, he said, “This is no good. This is a beautiful suit. The nicest cloth. It should lie just right across the shoulders. But it is too big. I can make it look okay, but not how it should look.” When Scott called over the salesperson, the salesperson and Antonio got into a heated discussion, just out of earshot. Scott didn’t need to hear what they were saying to get the gist of it. Needless to say, he didn’t buy the suit or anything from their store that day (or since). Unlike the first example, he didn’t experience seamless, coordinated teamwork. They didn’t demonstrate teamwork behaviors or handle conflict constructively; instead, they set each other up to fail.
This chapter is about coordination, or the behaviors that underlie effective teamwork. It is often what we might think of when we use the term teamwork. Whenever team members must rely on one another in any way, teamwork behaviors matter. Of course, as we explored in prior chapters, how people feel and the skills they possess are also important, but the rubber meets the road when we see if they are exhibiting the right teamwork behaviors.
Thought Experiment. While reading this chapter on coordination, ask:
• How effectively does your team maintain situational awareness—of teammates’ needs and what’s going on that can affect the team?
• How well do team members back up and support one another? Do they adapt effectively to challenges?
• How do they handle conflict? Is their approach more competitive (my idea must win) or collaborative (the best idea should win)?
Let’s start by turning to our trusted resource, the meta-analysis. Jeff LePine and his colleagues examined this question by meta-analyzing 138 prior research samples involving over 3,000 teams. They found that teams with better coordination demonstrated consistently higher levels of performance and were more satisfied and cohesive. Teamwork behaviors certainly matter. Moreover, teams can learn how to coordinate more effectively. In a meta-analysis of team training interventions conducted by Eduardo and two of his colleagues, Diana Nichols and Jim Driskell, the most potent training strategy was one that focused on improving team coordination and adaptation.
A study conducted in the United Kingdom illustrates how coordination can save lives. Dimitrios Siassakos and his colleagues studied medical teams dealing with simulated obstetrics emergencies, specifically eclampsia. Eclampsia is a potentially catastrophic complication during pregnancy, where high blood pressure produces seizures. They found that medical teams that demonstrated better teamwork administered magnesium to the patient 2.5 minutes faster and oxygen 25 seconds faster than teams with less coordinated teamwork. In cases like these, a delayed response can prove to be fatal. While team coordination isn’t always the difference between life and death, in medical cases, it can be! In other instances, it can determine whether a project is completed on time or whether someone has a positive shopping experience and becomes a repeat customer.
Not surprisingly, LePine’s meta-analysis also revealed that coordination is increasingly important when team members must rely on one another to accomplish the team’s goals. At one extreme, a fully independent worker has little concern with coordination. Consider James, an artist who paints still-life imagery, specializing in bowls of fruit. James only has to coordinate briefly with a supplier to ensure he has the brushes, paints, and canvas he needs and then with an art dealer afterwards, to arrange to sell his work. While he is working, he works alone. Any monitoring and adjusting is done by James. If James was painting a human model, then a tad more coordination would be needed, but fruit bowls are very acquiescent and are never late for work.
In contrast, consider a team involved in producing and performing a play. The director, the actors, the stagehands, and everyone else involved in the process rely on each other continuously to produce a great experience for the audience. Team coordination is essential to their success.
The level of reliance within a team dictates how important coordination is for the team’s success. In addition, coordination may be more challenging, but no less important when:
• There are continual membership changes (when the team is low on member stability).
• Task requirements are dynamic and varied (low on task consistency).
• Team members work from different locations (low on proximity).
• Team members possess different areas of expertise or experience or use different languages or terminology to communicate (low on similarity).
After reviewing the large body of research on teamwork and observing countless teams in a myriad of settings, we’ve identified four of the most universally applicable and consistently important teamwork behaviors. These are:
• Monitoring (maintaining situation awareness [SA]): Remaining cognizant and aware of what is going on within and outside the team that might affect their success.
• Providing back-up/support: Providing advice, support, or filling in for a team member when needed.
• Adapting: Learning from experience and making adjustments to address needs and improve performance.
• Managing team emotions and conflict: Dealing with conflicting points of view, managing team members’ emotions, and taking actions that maintain morale.
LePine’s meta-analysis examined ten different types of teamwork behaviors. One of those behaviors was monitoring. They found that teams that were better at monitoring demonstrated consistently higher levels of team performance. This confirms what we know intuitively— that a team is better able to perform effectively when its team members are alert and aware, are watching out for one another, and have an accurate sense of what’s going on that might affect the team.
Human factors experts often use the term situation awareness to reflect this understanding of what is going on that may affect performance. One of the early proponents of this term was Mica Endsley, the first woman to serve as Chief Scientist of the US Air Force. Endsley developed a comprehensive model and theory about SA that involves perception, comprehension, and projection.
Perception is being aware of what is going on. It involves being alert and attuned to challenges in the environment and what your teammates are experiencing. Comprehension is interpreting that in a meaningful way. It is like the concept of sensemaking, which the venerable Karl Weick wrote about extensively. Looking back on what we’ve been seeing, hearing, and experiencing, how do we explain what is really going on? Sense-making has been referred to as a “way station” on the path to action. While sense-making is a backwards look to explain what happened, projection is a forward look. Projection is trying to anticipate what is likely to happen, allowing a person or team to take appropriate actions.
Perception, comprehension, and projection can happen individually or collectively. For example, if I uncover a rumor that one of our competitors may be launching a new product, that’s individual perception. When I share that information with other members of my team and they add what they have been hearing, that is collective perception. When together we interpret what that information means and the potential implications of it, we are engaging in collective comprehension and projection. In a team setting, collective SA often leads to better quality decisions and actions, because typically, no individual can see and understand everything that is going on—even the leader.
Effective monitoring or SA is what allows teams to initiate the other coordination behaviors. As depicted in Figure 6.1, it enables them to provide backup/support, make constructive adjustments and adaptations, and effectively manage team emotions. In a study of simulated combat teams, Michelle Marks and Frederick Panzer confirmed this relationship—monitoring enables other forms of coordination, which, in turn, boosts team effectiveness.
Figure 6.1. Cooperative behaviors and team effectiveness.
SA = situational awareness.
While the details vary from team to team and setting to setting, in general, effective teams monitor three things. They monitor (a) one another, (b) team performance, and (c) the conditions in which they operate. The following is a list of questions that a team with strong SA can probably answer:
• How are my teammates doing? How are they feeling?
• How effectively are they performing their own work and coordinating with one another?
• Is anyone struggling or in need of assistance? Do I need assistance?
• How well is our team performing? How strong are our results?
• Where are we making progress and where are we struggling? Are our adjustments working?
• What merits additional attention or a potential adjustment?
• What is currently going on that could affect the team? What may be coming up that we should be aware of?
• Have there been any change in demands, expectations, workload, task requirements, needs, or resources? Are any likely to happen in the near future?
• Given the situation, what changes should we be making or be prepared to make if needed?
To be fair, you can’t expect each team member to monitor everything, all the time. That type of hypervigilance is an unrealistic expectation that will collapse under its own weight. Monitoring is often distributed, but collectively, as a team, could you answer the previously noted questions about one another, the team, and the conditions? If so, your team is probably doing an effective job of monitoring.
Monitoring is an enabling coordination behavior; without it, it is difficult to support one another and adapt effectively. But conversely, monitoring without subsequent actions such as filling in for someone, making an adjustment, or dealing with an emergent conflict is insufficient.
If you believe that your team can do a better job of maintaining SA, you can help boost their SA by identifying where the potential problem lies:
• If important things are going unnoticed, then you may want to
• Allocate time for scanning and pulse checking.
• Clarify expectations about what “we need to keep an eye on.”
• Designate people to pay attention to specific areas of interest.
• If team members are noticing things but are not sharing their observations, you may have a psychological safety issue and should take some of the actions we recommended in chapter 5.
• As a starting point, be sure that everyone knows who they should communicate with when they perceive something that may affect the team.
• If you think the team could be better at interpreting the signs, engage the team in periodic, “What might that mean” conversations to boost their collective understanding.
In highly effective teams, you’ll often see team members providing backup or support to one another. Sometimes this is a required response, for example, when triggered by a leader request. But highly effective teams also provide what can be thought of as discretionary support, triggered by team members, without a formal requirement to do so.
Backup can take several forms such as (a) providing advice or feedback to help someone perform a task more effectively, (b) assisting or lending a hand while the team member works on the task, and (c) completing a task or filling in for someone, for example, when they are overloaded or distracted.
In the Nordstrom story at the start of this chapter, we saw effective back-up behavior between two sales reps. Offering and seeking support, at the right times, are two clear keys to team effectiveness. So, what do we know about back-up behavior?
Whether someone will offer to support or back up another team member is a function of three factors:
• Monitoring—Am I in a position to recognize that you may need support?
• Expectations—Do I believe that I am supposed to help out (and am I willing)?
• Capability—Do I have the competencies (and time) needed to support you constructively?
Whether someone will seek assistance operates in a parallel manner:
• Monitoring—Do I recognize that I may need assistance?
• Expectations—Do I believe that it is acceptable to seek help?
• Capability—Do I know who has the necessary competencies to help me?
A deficiency in any of the three factors can lead to inaction or ineffectiveness. Here’s a rather extreme example from one of the authors. Scott was scheduled to take a short commuter flight from Albany, New York, to Boston, Massachusetts. He arrived at the airport in his business suit (not purchased on Fifth Avenue!) and went to the gate, where the eight other passengers were waiting. The flight was delayed, and the passengers started chatting. It was clear from the conversation that Scott was not a pilot and not a member of the airline, just another business guy with a meeting in Boston. Finally, the pilot, who was standing by the gate in uniform during this time, said they were ready to go and led the passengers to a small, 10-seat, propeller-driven plane. There was no co-pilot or flight attendant. While boarding, Scott asked the pilot, “Do you mind if I sit up front,” and surprisingly, the pilot said, “No problem.”
I want you to imagine that you are one of the passengers. You spoke with Scott in the terminal and know he’s not a pilot. Now he is sitting in the cockpit. How confident are you that he can provide effective backup if the pilot suffers a heart attack? Scott was in a position to monitor the pilot, as he was seated just two feet away. He seemed willing to help, as the pilot kept saying things like, “Don’t touch that.” But he clearly lacked the capability to fill in (his entire flight experience to date had consisted of flying and crashing an F-16 jet simulator). Despite his careful monitoring and his apparent willingness to help, we should not expect effective back-up behavior from Scott in this instance. He lacked the necessary competence.
It is easier to back up and fill in for a teammate when you share similar skills, terminology, and job responsibilities. Having a common perspective and skill set eliminates one potential barrier to providing assistance. For example, when a waitress stops by your table to explain the evening’s specials because she noticed that your waiter is busy with another table, she was able to do so quite easily because she shared the same knowledge as your waiter. She is even more likely to do so if she has a higher level of collective orientation—if she is someone who tends to think about the team and not just herself.
We also know that backup happens more naturally when team members are familiar with one another. Eduardo and our colleagues Kim Smith-Jentsch, Kurt Kraiger, and Jan Cannon-Bowers, studied air traffic controllers (ATC). I think we can all agree that we really, really want ATCs to avoid mistakes. We want them to seek help when they are overloaded and fill in for one another when they see a potential problem emerging. The researchers in this study examined 51 commercial ATC teams and found that teammates who had spent more time working together sought and accepted back up more frequently from each other than those who had less experience working together. This occurred in part because the ATCs knew who to turn to when they had a particular need. Knowing who has knowledge and expertise on your team is called transactive memory, and we’ll examine that further in the chapter on cognitions. In that chapter, we’ll also explore why some team members can provide seamless backup and support without saying a word to one another.
We can all agree about the potential value of back-up behaviors. We want the nurse or scrub tech to step up when the surgeon who is operating on us needs something. We want someone to help the overwhelmed ATC who is guiding our airplane into a busy airport. But we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that there is a downside to back-up behavior. A team of researchers, led by Chris Barnes, conducted a series of lab studies to examine the potential “costs” of providing back-up support.
They found that, as expected, back-up behavior is usually beneficial to the person receiving the support. However, team members who receive continual back-up support may start to decrease the amount of work they do over time. In some instances, persistent back-up behavior may lead employees to engage in social loafing, because they assume that someone will fill in for them if needed. In addition, there are times when helping someone else can result in neglecting one’s own work. They found that when workload was evenly distributed, for example, when everyone on the team is very busy, then taking time to help someone else may cause you to drop the ball on your own work. It appears that back-up behavior is easiest when there is uneven work distribution, for example, when someone has the time to help. Overall, you should certainly encourage and prepare your team to back up and help one another. But you should also be alert for any unintended consequences.
If people on your team aren’t offering to help because expectations aren’t clear (or perhaps teammates don’t know one another very well),
• Clarify the situations when you expect team members to back up one another.
• When you see the need, actively guide someone to step up and help out.
If it isn’t clear where and when backup is typically needed,
• Conduct a “team coordination analysis” which answers the following questions:
• Who might need support and for what?
• Who should help out and should they help by providing advice, active assistance, and/or filling in?
• Do they have the skills and capacity to do so and if not, how can we prepare them?
If people aren’t offering to help because they lack the skills (or people aren’t asking for help because there isn’t anyone skilled enough to help),
• Conduct targeted cross-training, which is simply training another team member(s) to be able to perform a part or all of another job.
If people aren’t offering to help because they aren’t motivated to do so,
• Modify your reward and recognition practices. Are you inadvertently sending the message that doing your own job is all that matters? Do you recognize people when they help out?
• When you hire new team members, look for people who have a strong collective orientation—they are more likely to provide assistance naturally and can help change the “norms” within the team.
If people aren’t asking for help when they should,
• Uncover why they are unwilling or uncomfortable doing so.
• Examine the consequences of seeking help. A lack of willingness to ask for help may yet again be a result of insufficient psychological safety!
The best teams are rarely great on day 1. They become great by maintaining SA, learning, and adjusting. Adaptation is essential for any team that doesn’t live in a completely static environment. And, really, who lives in a completely static environment? We probably don’t need to convince you about the importance of team adaptation but recall that the most effective team training approach is one that helps teams adapt effectively. And a failure to adapt can have terrible consequences.
The September 11th attacks is a catastrophic example of what can happen when teams don’t adapt. The 9/11 Commission Report highlighted how teams in the intelligence community failed to adjust to changing threats. Despite warning signs to the contrary, teams continued to engage in practices that were designed to protect against large, governmental adversaries rather than more dynamic terrorist threats. No one can say whether the September 11th attacks could have been averted, but the Commission concluded that an inability to adapt contributed to the failure.
There are an endless set of adaptations that teams can make. Stewart, the salesperson at Nordstrom, adapted when he recognized a need and filled in for Sue. You can probably think of any number of adaptations or adjustments that your team has made in the last week. We find that it can be helpful to differentiate between two ways that teams adapt, both of which begin with effective monitoring.
Some adaptations are triggered by an event or cue. For example, in a medical case, when the patient starts to show unexpected problems during a routine surgery, the team needs to recognize what is going on and switch from their normal routine to emergency mode. That is an example of a real-time, event-driven adaptation. Many of these adaptations occur when a team experiences a “nonroutine” event and needs to make a quick, on-the-fly adjustment. A real-time need emerges, the team recognizes it, interprets what is going on, and anticipating what might happen next, decides whether to make an adjustment to address the situation. A real-time adjustment might be to quickly reprioritize, dedicate additional (or fewer) resources or attention to a task, do a quick “work-around,” fill in for somebody, switch roles, initiate a different procedure, etc.
Other adaptations occur through reflection and are driven by the recognition of a gap, a change in the environment, or simply an awareness that the team may be able to do something better than they have in the past. The adaptation could be a process improvement, a change in strategy or in the “plan,” the introduction of an innovation, or just a targeted “tweak” to how the team works together based on a consideration of the past. You can think of those adjustments as more reflection-driven, learning adaptations. Michaela Schippers, Michael West, and Jeremy Dawson studied 98 primary healthcare teams in the United Kingdom and found that teams that overtly reflect on their work processes demonstrated higher levels of innovation, particularly in challenging work environments.
Some teams operate in dynamic environments where real-time adjustments are commonplace and frequent; for example, a combat team must continually adapt to changing conditions. Other teams—for example, on a manufacturing production line—operate in more stable environments. Regardless, effective teams make both real-time, event-driven adaptations and reflection-driven, learning adaptations, as needed. Jessica Christian and her colleagues from the Universities of North Carolina and Georgia completed a meta-analysis of team adaptive performance and found that teams that engage in “stimulus-specific actions” (e.g., event-driven) demonstrate better performance, as do teams that engage in “learning behaviors” (e.g., reflection-driven).
So how does team adaptation work? Here are a few things we know.
Not surprisingly, teams respond to different types of challenges in different ways. Currently, we are studying how teams that live and work in isolated, confined environments adapt to challenges. We are examining how deep-sea saturation dive teams adapt to challenges. These are teams that install and repair equipment hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea. They live in a small hyperbaric chamber for around 28 days at a time, leaving the chamber in a dive bell to perform their work in rotating eight-hour shifts. We have also studied the adaptation behaviors of teams living and conducting research in an isolated, confined habitat called HI-SEAS on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. Once a HI-SEAS team enters the habitat, they remain there for eight months, only leaving to perform tasks near the habitat in hazmat suits. And we’ve been conducting research with teams that live and work in a small NASA habitat called HERA, similar to what a team might live in on Mars. HERA teams perform multimonth missions that are designed to be similar to what future astronaut teams will experience.
The type of challenges that require attention in these isolated environments are quite different than those that teams typically experience in corporate environments. For example, the deep sea, HI-SEAS, and HERA teams that work and live together in tight quarters must adapt to some of the same challenges you may have experienced if you shared a dorm room in college. What do you do when your teammates have a different perspective regarding cleanliness, noise, or privacy? And at the other extreme, the saturation dive teams must occasionally adapt to challenges that, left unabated, could be life-threatening.
Despite their differences, extreme teams and typical corporate teams share a similar foundation. They are more effective when they maintain SA, make sense of what’s going on, recognize when adaptation is needed, and make adjustments to fit the conditions—on a real-time basis and by periodically pausing and reflecting on their work.
Leaders can greatly influence whether and how a team adapts. The research shows that when leaders empower their teams, team learning is greater. This was confirmed in a meta-analysis conducted by Shawn Burke and her colleagues at the University of Central Florida. In our work with teams, we’ve often seen how micromanagement, or an unwillingness to empower the team, suppresses learning and adaptation.
While empowerment is important, we’d advise leaders to let their team know where adaptation is encouraged and where it is unacceptable (or requires explicit approval). Empowerment is rarely limitless. Knowing the boundaries makes true empowerment feasible. When a team leader doesn’t specify the “nonnegotiables,” a team member can inadvertently get in trouble for making an unacceptable adaptation. When that happens, the entire team may erroneously conclude that they are not allowed to adapt and innovate.
And, of course, we’d be remiss without emphasizing the central role that psychological safety plays in adaptation. Why didn’t the team of mountain climbers adapt their plan in response to deteriorating weather conditions on that fatal climb in the Himalayas? Because the team leader didn’t create a sense of psychological safety. Leader actions that build psychological safety provide the foundation for subsequent adaptations.
We want agreeable people on our team. Who doesn’t? But be careful about too much “agreeableness.” At times, team members need to ask, Why are we continuing to do things the same way? Teams need people who are willing to challenge the status quo and suggest adjustments. We’ve noticed that some long-tenured, highly successful teams fail to generate alternative perspectives. For example, we worked with a board of directors that experienced almost no turnover for a decade. Members of the board developed a fairly homogenous perspective and rarely offer dissenting perspectives. The organization is thriving, but our sense is that any significant organizational adaptations will need to be generated by the management team rather than the board. Interestingly, the board recently recognized the concern and started to discuss board succession practices to avoid stagnation.
A learning goal orientation is one that values increasing competence (Let’s get better) more than avoiding failure (Let’s not make a mistake). In general, teams that have members with a stronger learning orientation should be more open to trying out new things. For instance, Jeff LePine found that teams staffed with people who possess a strong learning orientation were much more likely to adapt to a changing situation. But several researchers, including J. Stuart Bunderson and Kathleen Sutcliffe, who studied management teams, have shown that overemphasizing team learning can result in an undue focus on “process” that can compromise short-term performance. We acknowledge this is possible, but in our experience, teams are more likely to underemphasize than overemphasize learning, particularly when they are busy. It is easy to get caught up in deadlines and to-do lists and continue to “plow ahead” with blinders on, when a little bit of targeted reflection would have allowed the team to tackle their challenges more intelligently.
A proven method for promoting team reflection and adjusting is the team debrief. During a team debrief, team members reflect on a recent experience or how they have been working together. They discuss what happened, uncover problems and areas for improvement, confirm successes, and reach agreements about any adjustments they intend to make going forward. A debrief can range from a quick 10-minute check-in to an elaborate postproject, half-day, after-action review.
The research in this area is clear and compelling; teams should make time to conduct periodic debriefs as they accelerate learning, enable adaptation, and improve team performance. Scott and his colleague Chris Cerasoli published a meta-analysis showing that teams that conduct debriefs outperform other teams by an average of 20%! And in a study Scott, Kim Smith-Jentsch, and Scott Behson conducted for the US Navy, teams led by leaders who were trained to conduct effective team debriefs performed up to 40% better. Why? Because debriefs enabled the teams to adjust and self-correct over time.
We’ve run debriefs with all sorts of teams, for example, with manufacturing teams that make potato chips and other snacks (Cheetos taste great fresh off the assembly line!), senior leadership teams that make billion-dollar business decisions, medical teams that affect patient’s lives, military teams (the military were the first to embrace the concept of after-action reviews), and even astronauts in training. When conducted properly, all these teams found debriefing to be a positive experience. Since we know team debriefs work and are well-received, we want to strongly encourage you to conduct them.
Dan McFarland was a coach for the Scottish National Rugby team and now leads the Ulster Rugby team in Ireland. He is a thoughtful consumer of team science. He has been using different forms of team debriefs to prepare his team for international competition, refining their approach to debriefing over time. He’s particularly focused on ensuring his players are actively engaged during their debriefs and not passively listening to the coaches. As he told us, “during a game or practice I can see what they are doing, but only they can feel it,” so everyone needs to share their perceptions if we want to learn from the experience and continue to improve.
You’ll find a set of detailed tips for conducting effective debriefs along with a session outline for leading a quick team debrief in the Tools section at the end of the book.
Team coordination isn’t just about backing up one another and making adjustments. It is also about taking appropriate actions to manage team member emotions and deal effectively with conflict when it arises. That requires a specific type of monitoring, keeping an eye on your teammates and periodically taking the pulse of the team. How is Joe feeling? Is the team up or down? Who needs a little additional attention? What types of disagreements are arising and are we addressing them constructively? We’ll focus on the last question and examine what the research can tell us about how effective teams deal with conflict and disagreements.
Conflict isn’t inherently good or bad. But when conflict is handled poorly, it generates negative emotions, hurts morale, and degrades team performance. On the other hand, if team members never disagree, you are unlikely to see enough innovation or adaptation. It is also likely to be a sign of other problems, for example, a discomfort in voicing a divergent point of view. Teams need properly directed and well-handled conflict to sustain long-term success.
Fortunately, there is a solid body of research on conflict that can help guide us toward the positive end of the destructive—constructive conflict continuum.
A team conflict begins when one or more team members perceive that their interests or point of view are being opposed (politely or otherwise) by another team member. All teams experience conflict, but not all conflicts are the same. Researchers have distinguished between task conflict (about work content and outcomes), interpersonal conflict (about personal issues), and process conflict (about work logistics; e.g., who gets assigned certain tasks). Karen Jehn and Jennifer Chatman, professors at the University of Melbourne and the University of California Berkeley, found that in higher performing teams, a greater proportion of their conflicts are task-related than in lower performing teams. They also identified that when team members perceive different amounts of conflict on the team, troubles can ensue. If I believe that there are no conflicts, and you think that I’m constantly disagreeing with your point of view, it is unlikely that we are handling conflict effectively.
The three types of conflict affect team performance differently. Frank de Wit (Leiden University), Lindred Greer (University of Amsterdam), and Karen Jehn conducted a meta-analysis of team conflict research. Their analyses, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, combined the results from 116 prior studies and were based on data from over 8,800 teams. They found that when teams experienced high levels of interpersonal or process conflict, team performance was consistently lower. But the results for task conflict were more complex. Task conflict does not necessarily degrade team performance and at times can be beneficial. So what influences whether task conflict is constructive?
Feeling safe matters. As you know by now, psychological safety is a shared belief among team members that it is okay to take some interpersonal risks and speak up without being punished, ostracized, or embarrassed. Bret Bradley from the University of Oklahoma and several of his colleagues conducted a study of 117 project teams and found that psychological safety is a major determinant of how task conflict affects team performance. Their results are clear. When psychological safety is high, task conflict generally boosts performance. If people feel safe speaking up, the team can disagree about work issues openly and make useful adjustments. If voicing a different opinion leads to a backlash, not only do people feel worse, but the team’s performance also suffers.
The composition of the team matters. Bradley and his team of researchers also examined how team personality influences whether task conflict will be beneficial. They found that teams made up of individuals who scored higher on “openness to experience” or on “emotional stability” (two of psychology’s Big Five personality factors) benefited from task conflict, while teams that scored low on those factors were adversely affected by task conflict. In fact, the pattern of results from this study implies that teams with high openness and emotional stability might need “ample” amounts of task conflict to attain high levels of performance. Some teams are composed of people who are inherently more ready to deal with task conflict constructively. And while research shows that teams made up of very similar individuals find it easy to work together, Clint Bowers and his colleagues at the University of Central Florida found that when teams are working on complex tasks, too much similarity can be a problem. Diversity of experience and perspective can be helpful.
The status of the person disagreeing matters. Nale Lehmann from the University of Amsterdam and Ming Chiu from the Education University of Hong Kong conducted a detailed analysis of almost 900 conversational disagreements during team meetings. They examined these conversations word for word and found that disagreements started by higher status individuals were more likely to result in subsequent agreements, in part because other team members were more likely to acquiesce. That is one reason why it is important for team leaders to avoid being the first to offer a point of view if they want their team to engage in a healthy discourse about a problem. Interestingly, they also found that disagreements were 35% less likely to begin after the prior speaker laughed.
The way conflict is handled matters. How a team interacts when disagreements emerge also determines whether task conflict ends up being constructive or destructive. Leslie DeChurch, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, and Dan Doty conducted a meta-analysis of 45 prior studies with over 3,000 teams. They found that the way a team handles conflict can be more important than what the conflict is about. Teams that deal with conflict by competing (each person lobbying for their own idea to “win”) or by trying to avoid the conflict are likely to suffer. In contrast, teams that use a collaborative or open-minded approach to conflict, where the intent is for the best idea to win, are more likely to improve as a result of the conflict. Uncovering concerns, openly discussing issues, constructively challenging the feasibility of solutions, and integrating ideas leads to better outcomes.
Every high-performing team that we’ve worked with has its share of disagreements and conflict. And for that matter, we’ve never seen a dysfunctional team that was conflict-free either. Given that conflict is ubiquitous, here are ten research-based tips for anyone who is a team leader:
Recognize that conflict is normal. It is not feasible or healthy to avoid conflict. Humans will disagree with one another. They will have different points of view about tasks, about how tasks should be assigned, and about people. And let’s face it, we simply like some people more than others. Conflict is going to happen. It is not a sign of failure, and suppressing it is not a viable option. It hasn’t gone away; you just aren’t seeing it, and your team’s effectiveness is probably suffering.
Take the time to address interpersonal disagreements between team members. The research shows that interpersonal conflicts can hurt a team’s performance. Unchecked, they can also erode psychological safety, in turn, making it difficult to have constructive disagreements about work-related issues. A team leader told us that an ongoing conflict between two of his team members “was their problem.” We advised him that “their” problem affects the team, and so, although he’d rather not deal with it, it was also his problem.
Some conflicts are best handled in private. When two team members have an interpersonal conflict, it should typically be handled in private. If it surfaces in a team setting, find a time to talk with each person individually and then together, but not in front of the entire team. In contrast, when psychological safety is high, a team discussion about a task-related conflict can be quite useful.
Surface and discuss concerns. Conflicts sometimes emerge because small concerns go unchecked. Talk with your team to surface irritants before they become bigger problems. In the research we are doing with NASA, we find that helping teams uncover and discuss potential irritants (for them, it’s about issues such as privacy, sleep, and meals) before they become a source of conflict is helping them avert problems later in the mission. Establish a pattern of identifying and discussing concerns openly and “conflict” can boost performance.
Make “deposits” to create a sense of psychological safety. The team leader greatly influences the degree to which a team feels safe. If you are the leader, look for opportunities to set the right tone. How? When a team member offers a dissenting point of view, thank him for speaking up (to encourage others to speak up). Be constructive when you disagree with someone (to model how to disagree effectively). Admit your own concerns or mistakes (so team members become comfortable voicing theirs). In contrast, want to know the easiest way to shut down a team? Punish someone for voicing a dissenting opinion.
Frame disagreements so they are about the work and not about the person. Disagreements that seem “person-related” are perceived as interpersonal conflict. You can take an opposing view about a work idea without sounding like you are opposed to the person offering the idea.
Recognize that “process conflict” has a cost. The research showed that process conflict (e.g., disagreeing about how work is assigned) is negatively related to performance. But at times the leader may need to assign or schedule work in a way that is not universally popular. That’s part of the leader’s job, but don’t assume that it will simply be seen as a “business decision.” The research hints that this can be viewed as personal, so if you’re the leader, take the time to explain your rationale to a team member who might feel slighted and ensure that they at least feel they have been heard.
Choose your team wisely. When you have the chance, select people for your team who are open to experience and emotionally stable. That alone will improve the chances that differing points of view about work will boost rather than hurt your team’s performance.
Know your team. Some people are more comfortable with conflict than others. And there are cultural differences as well. Countries have differing norms about the appropriateness of speaking up. And even within a country there can be differences. In the United States, we facilitated a meeting in the Midwest where people are very nice and tend to be somewhat conflict averse and then went to a meeting in New York where people tend to readily vocalize disagreements, although not always constructively! Be aware of your team’s preferences and encourage them to speak up or coach them to be more constructive, as needed.
Know yourself. How do you feel about conflict? Both of the authors generally enjoy task conflict—you would probably have gotten a chuckle watching the two of us debate aspects of this book. And while we like to believe that we promote “constructive friction” in our teams, we suspect not everyone sees it that way! Knowing your tendencies can enable you to tone it down or amp it up accordingly.
• Coordination involves teamwork behaviors, including monitoring the team and environment, helping teammates, making adjustments, and managing emotions. It is where the rubber meets the road.
• Coordination is more difficult when team membership is frequently changing, task requirements are dynamic, people work in different locations, or team members have diverse capabilities and perspectives. If your team has any of these characteristics, you are likely to have coordination challenges and may need to attend to promoting coordination more consciously.
• Better SA enables better coordination. SA involves perception (what’s going on), comprehension (what it means), and projection (what is likely to happen). Teams perform better when there is a collective sharing or assessment of those elements since typically, no team member can see everything.
• Effective teams monitor one another, their team’s performance, and the conditions around them. If your team can’t answer the nine “What do good teams monitor?” questions posed in this chapter, that’s a sign that there is room for improvement.
• Backup can take several forms such as (a) providing advice or feedback to help someone perform a task more effectively, (b) assisting or lending a hand while the team member works on the task, and (c) completing a task or filling in for someone, for example, when they are overloaded or distracted. If you aren’t confident that your team knows when they should seek and offer to provide backup, consider conducting a coordination analysis and clarifying expectations. Don’t assume they know!
• The best teams become great by making ongoing adjustments including both real-time, event-driven adaptations and reflection-driven, learning adaptations.
• A team debrief is a simple, powerful, inexpensive way of promoting learning, identifying useful adaptations, and improving performance. Schedule time to conduct short, periodic debriefs. Follow the tips in the Debrief Tool at the end of the book and try to avoid the common pitfalls.
• Conflict is natural and normal, but when teams experience a great deal of interpersonal or process conflict, team performance typically suffers. But task-related conflict can be constructive, particularly if your team adopts a collaborative approach to handling disagreements (“Let’s try to find the best solution”) as opposed to a competitive approach (“Everyone is lobbying for their idea to win”) or trying to avoid conflict.
• You’ll notice a recurring theme in this and prior chapters. Psychological safety is a big deal. A lack of psychological safety can inhibit people from sharing what they see, from seeking or offering to help, from suggesting necessary adjustments, and from getting benefits out of disagreements. In other words, it can greatly inhibit teamwork, so pay attention to building and sustaining psychological safety.