Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

From the moment you start each workday, you’re subject to two basic human impulses: to excel and to conform.

If people in your immediate environment are amazing performers, you might be able to do both at once: By excelling, you fit the norm of your spectacular coworkers. But that’s rare. I’m pretty sure that in most work environments, as soon as you excel, you stop conforming. If you choose a high-performance path, you separate yourself from your coworkers. You’re not quite one of the bunch anymore. No matter how proud you are of your achievements, tell me it doesn’t hurt when you see your old group of friends coming back from a lunch that you somehow hadn’t known about.

I was thinking about this while reading research on the psychological and social effects not of being a high performer but of experiencing an extraordinary event, because the two situations share a few things in common. When something exciting and unusual happens to us, even if it’s random, we’ve excelled, in a way. We’re special. We no longer conform.

The research, by Gus Cooney and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, shows that after we go through an extraordinary experience, we assume that we’ll really enjoy telling the tale. But when we try, we often don’t feel so good about it. We feel separate. We sense that the group resents our excellent adventure. The study focused on experiences that are really only slightly extraordinary, such as watching an interesting video, but the results are pretty clear: A special experience distances us from other people, and the responses we see in our peers makes us feel excluded.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, an assistant professor in the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University, has put a different lens on what divides us from our coworkers and why. Along with Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University and Jana L. Raver of Queen’s University in Canada, Jensen studied a large Midwestern field office of a U.S. financial services firm, using surveys to find out what was going on among coworkers — in the workrooms, during team meetings, in the lunchroom, and on email.

The researchers found that even in a collegial, well-behaved workplace, not only are you perceived as different if you’re a high performer; you’re also sometimes victimized. High-performing employees in this environment scored 3.37 on a 1-to-5 scale of victimization frequency, with 1 representing “never” and 5 representing “once a week or more.” They scored significantly higher on this measure of being victimized than average and poorly performing workers.

Mostly, the victimization was subtle, which is understandable, given the risks of being called out as a bully. So instead of being overtly nasty, people avoid you or withhold resources. Or they schedule important meetings when you happen to be out of town.

It probably goes without saying that there’s no rational logic to the victimization of high performers. After all, if you’re a high performer, by definition you have an outsized impact on the organization, and you help make the workgroup shine. Your victimizers’ incentive pay is probably even based (at least in part) on your achievements.

Still, what’s rational about human behavior? As Jensen pointed out to me, human beings have a pronounced tendency to punish those who violate unspoken norms. Average performers worry that you’re making them look bad. If they can bring you down a notch, they can alleviate (or at least they think they can alleviate) their negative feelings by reminding you what an “acceptable” level of performance looks like.

But one of the more interesting aspects of Jensen’s research is that the covert victimization is spotty — it doesn’t apply to all high performers. Certain achievers are spared the worst of the victimization. These are what Jensen and her colleagues call “benevolent” high performers.

Benevolent high performers are sensitive to what’s fair for other people; they put others’ needs ahead of their own. They’re cooperative, even altruistic at times.

OK, no great news there. But the reality is that high performers too often slip into what Jensen would call “non-benevolence” without even realizing it. They start to feel entitled to their hard-won authority. Sometimes they step on or manipulate others, telling themselves that all’s fair in pursuit of the greater good. Pretty soon they’re consistently putting their own needs first. To measure this, the researchers used the surveys to place employees along a continuum of behavior, with “entitled” at one end and “benevolent” at the other. Here “entitled” means having “low equity sensitivity” — a poor sense of what’s fair to others. (As you can see from the chart, low achievers are victimized too, but the researchers found that there’s a different rationale: Weak performers are punished for jeopardizing their coworkers’ success. Benevolence doesn’t help them much.)

So if you’re a high performer who’s being excluded or cold-shouldered, maybe it’s not so much your excellence that your coworkers are reacting to but your creeping non-benevolence. If they’re not looping you into lunch invites, maybe it’s because they’re starting to sense that you’re putting your own needs ahead of theirs.

If that’s the case, you know what to do. Jensen’s research shows that practicing thoughtfulness and cooperativeness really does work to defuse your colleagues’ impulse to take you down.

Cooney et al frame the issue as black and white. They write that there’s a basic conflict between our desires to “do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else,” so that if we satisfy our impulse to stand out, we can’t conform any longer, and failure to conform leads to feelings of exclusion.

Jensen’s view suggests a different way of looking at it: Even if your high performance puts you on another plane, separating you from your old bunch, that nonconformity doesn’t have to come with the punishments of rejection or sniping. If you make an effort to be altruistic, the group will reward you. If not with lunch invitations, then at least with acceptance —  a kind of benevolence of its own.

via Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams – Andrew O’Connell – Harvard Business Review.

Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

Hire for "fit" with group dynamics

Hiring is no easy task. When it comes down to the hiring process, HR professionals and Hiring Managers are posed with one of the most difficult tasks in the corporate world – finding and enticing the best talent. However, the most difficult task is not finding, vetting, or even interviewing thousands of candidates. The real struggle is in hiring to build strong group dynamics.

What are group dynamics?

Group dynamics is a term coined in the 1940’s by Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist and change management expert. Mr. Lewin had noticed that people often take on distinct roles and behaviors when they work together in a group. Group dynamics is the effect that these roles and behaviors have on other group members, and how each group member contributes to the unit as a whole.

With this in mind – hiring instantly becomes a much more intricate and critical task for any organization. In order to promote the success of your company’s internal teams, HR professionals and hiring managers must now hire for technical ability AND the ability to contribute positively to their group dynamics.

There are many ways in which poor group dynamics can negatively affect the performance of your employees.

What are some causes behind negative group dynamics?

• Lack of leadership: A team without a strong leader can lead to a lack of direction/priorities

• Group Thinking: When there is a higher desire for consensus over each individuals desire to reach the proper solution.

• Freeloading: When other team members take it easy and let their fellow colleagues to the majority of the work.

• Peer Apprehension: This occurs when a team member feels that they are being judged by their peers.

• Walls: Walls or “blocking” occur when team members’ behavior disrupts information flow. There are many types of group roles that can put up “walls”, including:

• The Aggressor: One who often disagrees with other team members


• The Hermit: One who does not participate in group discussion/communications


• The Naysayer: One who is often overly critical of others


• The Trophy Seeker: One who is overly boastful/domineering for recognition

How do I improve group dynamics?

• Provide personality assessments when hiring/building your team. Keep in mind how different personalities will work together, and what this means for the productivity of your organization.

• Be familiar with your team. Knowing how your team works individually and as a unit will help you prevent future issues in your group structure.

• Be vocal. Providing feedback is critical, as it will allow you to show each team member the impact of their actions, and encourage positive change.

• Utilize team building exercises. Building a great team takes more than just picking the right personality types – if involves nurturing healthy relationships. Even great group dynamics require some development.

There is no secret formula for building great group dynamics. However, it is an important factor to consider before you issue an offer letter to your next hire. The next time you are conducting an interview – ask yourself these two questions:

Can this candidate perform the job?

How will this candidate perform the job on our team?

via The Vesume Group | Hire for “fit” with group dynamics.

Hire for "fit" with group dynamics

Why Women Prefer Working Together (and Why Men Prefer Working Alone)

One of the puzzles of the persistent gender wage gap is why women are highly overrepresented in certain fields, like the nonprofit sector, and hugely underrepresented in other fields, like financial institutions and executive positions in major companies. One reasonable question to ask about the gap is: How much should we blame “the system” (i.e.: clubby nepotism, sexism, lack of paternity leave) and how much should we chalk this up to women’s decisions (i.e.: leaning out in their late 20s and choosing careers that pay less even when they had options to earn more).

Peter J. Kuhn and Marie-Claire Villeval wade into this contentious field with a new study: “Are Women More Attracted to Cooperation Than Men?” The short answer is, well, yes. The more complex answer is: Yes, because men demonstrate more overconfidence in their own abilities and distrust in their colleagues’ aptitude, except under key situations.

Numerous studies have shown that women prefer to work in teams, men prefer to work alone, and women perform worse in competitive environments, even when their performance was similar to men in noncompetitive environments. Kuhn and Villeval wanted to understand why. Although their experiment is highly theoretical, its real-world applications are clear. Women outnumber men in many helping occupations, from charitable organizations to nursing, both of which offer cooperative production with less financial reward.

Their most important conclusion involves perceptions of relative competence. Basically, if you think your colleagues are idiots, you don’t want to cast your lot with them. But if you think your colleagues are smart, you’ll see the advantages in working as a team. Women demonstrated less confidence about their own abilities, the researchers said, and more confidence in their potential partners’ abilities. They were also much more sensitive to increasing their potential partner’s incomes, reinforcing a well-established idea that women demonstrate more “inequity aversion” than men. That is, they’re less comfortable with their colleagues making dramatically different salaries.

But, interestingly, the researchers found that a tiny tweak in team-based compensation erased this entire gender gap.

Kuhn and Villeval cleverly ran an experiment allowing men and women to select team-work versus solo-work, and then re-ran the experiment increasing the returns from excellent team-work by about 10 percent. Once they did this, the cooperation gap between men and women disappeared, as you can see in the difference between Figure 1 and Figure 2 below (EA Treatment = efficiency advantages, or modestly increasing the gains from teamwork).

“The gender gap in the willingness to form a team vanishes when efficiency advantages are introduced,” the researchers said, “because both genders increase their team choices, but men’s increase is much larger. ” In other words, men are more sensitive than women to small tweaks in team-based compensation.

Maybe that sounds absurdly theoretical to you. But it’s a lesson many corporations are already putting to work. The number of Fortune 1000 companies using workgroup or team incentives for at least a fifth of their workers more than doubled between 1990 and 2002, and management have switched to team-pay in both the minimill and the apparel industry.

This isn’t just a story about gender wage gaps; it’s a story about motivation. In manufacturing and other complex processes, teamwork is vital. It’s not enough to focus on making brilliant women feel confident. It’s also key to make overconfident men trust that their colleagues just might be competent

via Why Women Prefer Working Together (and Why Men Prefer Working Alone) – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic.

Why Women Prefer Working Together (and Why Men Prefer Working Alone)

For Better Teams, Hire Fewer Leaders

For many jobs, the followership ability is more useful than leadership ability.

When bosses are asked what they’re looking for in an employee, most of them put “leadership ability” near the top of the list. With all due respect, this is not the best idea.

Leadership sounds like a wonderful thing for everyone on a team to possess but a team that has more than one leader inevitably gets pulled in multiple directions.

Which means you’re probably going nowhere.

Unless you’re specifically hiring for a management position, you’re better off looking for a job candidate with followership ability.

Good followers can put their own egos aside and do what you want done, whether or not they think it’s the right thing to do.

Good followers put their creativity to work, not in setting grand visions, but instead by finding better and faster ways to do what you want done.

Good followers can be smarter than you and possess skills you lack… but they still trust that you know how they can best apply their brains and talents for the greater good.

Followership is the reason sports teams behave like teams; it’s why armies don’t crumble in combat; it’s why great religions survive for centuries.

Frankly, some of the worst run organizations in the world are those that have too many leaders. Take Congress, for instance. Need I say more?

If your hiring practices seek candidates with leadership ability, you might want to consider whether a good follower might be a better fit for many or most of those jobs.

via For Better Teams, Hire Fewer Leaders | Inc.com.

For Better Teams, Hire Fewer Leaders