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The (un)Happy Productive Brain

The (un)Happy Productive Brain

by | 2021 Mar 21 | Business Brains, Editor's Choice, Feature, Organisational Leadership, Senior Leadership, Team Leadership

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leadership brain magazine

Of Carrots and Sticks

Of Carrots and Sticks

by | 2021 Feb 11 | Business Brains, Feature, Organisational Leadership, Senior Leadership, Team Leadership

Just what does motivate individuals to perform

Reading time: about 10 minutes

Over the years there have been many proposals for rewarding and punishing, or not punishing behaviours. The current trend is to nudge people in the right direction – but this fails to account for deeply inbuilt personality types and subsequent different brain functioning. Let’s review how rewards and punishment drive motivation and behaviour.

motivation brain

Old logic sees punishment as motivation. Good ‘ole school systems used this: strict rules and give anyone who diverges of the righteous path a good beating. That will see them right. I grew up in Britain which still had the cane (a thin stick) as a punishment in schools – it was finally abolished when I was 14, but not after my brother and been given a good whipping at school. To be honest that didn’t bother him so much, it was a badge of honour in a boy’s school – the proverbial beating my mother gave him was much worse (she was a teacher to boot).

So, we see this pattern in society of severe punishment and this has slowly moderated over the centuries and recent decades. Now governments are using nudges and rewards to get people to behave in the right way. David Rock well known for coining term, neuroleadership, claims reward is the only path forward. Smacks of operant conditioning to me – was Skinner right all along? Doubtful – the brain, as always, will give us some answers.

The answers we need to first ask is that of motivation itself – if reward and punishment are seen as the means to an end i.e. a positive or effective behaviour, then we need to understand how the brain gets itself motivated. The research into motivation is long and complex and will break your patience for the moment, and break the page count for this issue, as interested as you may be. Short advertising interlude: We do give a short but comprehensive overview in our Brain and Behaviour Online courses. Interlude finished. Motivational research can be broken down into what (content theories) and how (process theories). But of most interest to us is the concept of approach and avoidance.

Approach and Avoidance

These are two motivational patterns well researched but of critical significance and still somewhat underrated in motivational research. Indeed, Elliot and Covington noted in an excellent, and still relevant, 2001 review that:

“… it is clear that the distinction between approach and avoidance motivation has deep and widespread intellectual roots, represents a part of the evolutionary heritage that humans share with organisms across the phylogenetic spectrum, is instigated immediately and automatically in response to most if not all stimuli humans encounter, is grounded in the basic neuroanatomical structures of the brain, and concords with the intuitively based knowledge of how humans are motivated in their daily lives.”

And go on to state:

“As such it is surprising that in much contemporary empirical and theoretical work on motivational issues, the approach-avoidance distinction is either overshadowed or overlooked altogether.”

To clarify, approach motivation is about moving towards, to achieve, to get something, and is reward driven. In our analogy it is the carrot. Avoidance motivation is about moving away from, protecting or fighting, it is the fear-based aversive form of motivation. In our analogy the stick – avoidance of punishment.

These two operate often in tandem – consider sporting teams who have a desire to win but also a desire not to lose. Both motivational directions are present. There is a tendency to see one as better than the other, but the fact remains that these are naturally present in all living organisms, so it is hard to justify one as being better than another – they are effective survival strategies which have been effective since the beginning of life and enabled all life forms to successfully propagate across the planet.

So now we have the motivational terminology for our carrots and sticks: approach and avoidance, let’s take a dive into the brain and see what this says about these forms of motivation before reviewing what this means for individuals, teams, and motivational strategies in, and out, of the workplace.

The Brain and Approach/Avoidance

Research and brain scanning has shown approach is related to reward centres in the brain and avoidance is associated with fear/ threat mechanisms:

motivation brain

Regions for approach in green, avoidance in red, and both in pink

  • Approach: ventral striatum (reward)
  • Avoidance: amygdala, thalamus, insula (fear & threat)

Aupperle & Paulus in 2010 showed that the orbitofrontal cortex is involved with balancing these inputs. No surprise as the orbitofrontal is considered one of the main decision-making centres particularly for those decisions with emotional input.

  • Orbital frontal cortex as decision making with inputs from ventral striatum modulating approach and inputs from Amygdala and Insula modulating avoidance
  • Dysfunction of respective networks could predict susceptibility to specific anxiety disorders

Spielberg et al. in 2009 found that there were hierarchical networks to do with planning and carrying out strategies and that these were hemisphere dependent. Planning being further forward in the brain – which would be expected as a more “frontal” function.

  • Hierarchical networks
  • System input from limbic regions and strategic integration at cortical levels
  • Left frontal processes achieve goals / right frontal avoidance goals

motivation brain

Hierarchical processing for approach in left hemisphere and avoidance in right hemisphere

So far so good. We can see that approach motivation is reward driven and related to reward centres in the brain, and that avoidance motivation is fear and threat driven, and related to respective centres in the brain. We can also see that for planning and implementation these use different centres in the brain, and these are located in the left hemispheres for approach strategizing and the right for avoidance strategizing and planning. One side effect of this different processing in different centres is that this can cause motivational conflict – reward centres may need to fight it out with fear centres and approach and avoidance strategies can both be present in both our hemispheres. This is something we all have experienced – that tough decision when we are not sure if the upsides outweigh the downsides. This is our orbitofrontal cortex working hard and trying to figure out which one to choose.

What is also clear is that they both are natural mechanisms which are present to some degree in all human beings. But the question you may want an answer to is do these differ in human beings and if so how?

Individualisation

The short answer is, of course. These can be considered personality traits as much as evolutionary-based strategies. Some people will be more avoidance focused and others more approach focused. In personality this was first ascribed to the concept of extraversion and introversion particularly in social contexts. The extravert attracted towards, approach, social stimuli, and the introvert, avoiding social stimuli. Extraverts are also more sensation seeking, attracted to more stimuli. Similarly, sensitivity people, previously called neurotics, tend to avoid stimuli and are more anxious, that is avoidant.

We have reviewed these personality traits to build our Human Behavioural Framework, and this is another discussion for another day, but of interest are the psychometric scales designed to measure specifically measure approach and avoidance. The best known of these is the Behavioural Activation System and Behavioural Inhibition System Scale (BIS/BAS) developed by Carver at the University of Miami. These therefore measure trait approach/avoidance rather than strategic or situational approach or avoidance.

The research shows that there are three subgroups of approach motivation:

    1. Drive – achievement focus
    2. Fun
    3. Reward sensitivity

But now back to the workplace and the question of carrots and sticks. What does this tell us about reward and punishment? Firstly, it says that different individuals will respond and be motivated by different stimuli. Those high on BAS will respond stronger to rewards and stimulation. Those higher in BIS respond stronger to sticks. Though this may sound like I am suggesting that we just threaten and beat those high on traits BIS this is not true. These people will respond and do respond and see the downside or risk whether you like it or not. Interestingly they also respond strongly, according to other research, to safety – these are the people who need high safety to perform best because their threat-based systems, though causing action, will not enable them to function to their best.

No surprise that we come back to the concept of psychological safety that we have spoken about in other articles. The other important point being that those higher on BIS will not respond strongly to rewards – carrots don’t work as well with these people.

This points therefore to a more refined strategy of motivating individuals. Or rather the concepts of carrots and sticks works on average across a large population group because in a large population group there will likely be a balance of those more driven by reward and those more driven by inhibition. But the problem is that there will be large variations between individuals. This is therefore why knowing your people is critical to getting the highest performance.

Approach individuals, driven by reward and achievement, work well with stretch goals, rewards of different types, are not so fearful and so can manage pressure well.

fear motivation brain

Pictures like this have been shown to activate threat centres in the brain.

This simply means that team leaders will need to understand the individuals in their team to get the best out of them. Indeed, in our model of leadership this is precisely the role of the team leader – to understand the individuals in the team and to get the best out of them. This may mean taking a different approach with different individuals. Giving the sensitive individual safety, and giving the achievement individuals stretch, and some pressure, but appreciating them both, and managing effectively the contribution of all (see our article on Issue 2021-01 on team performance).Avoidance individuals, driven by fear and safety, work better in safe environments, are driven by fear but this can cause high anxiety and disruptions. They are less responsive to rewards.

A final note is that of short-term reward and short-term punishment. Short-term spontaneous rewards are very activating for the brain reward system. It’s simply an expectation thing – if you have an expected reward the brain responds very weakly to the reward – if you get an unexpected reward the brain responds very highly because it’s a surprise. So small, unexpected rewards are highly effective means of creating positive motivating effects. In financial terms a few small $50 rewards can be more effective than a yearly expected $5’000 reward – surprising but true. So spread your carrots out.

In contrast, short-term spontaneous punishment creates disruption, feelings of unfairness (which are very powerful in terms of motivation – equity theory), and disrupts orientation mechanisms. Punishment has to be clear: what it is for, why, and dealt out fairly. Simply put, there should, and must be, consequences to bad behaviour and violations of norms. But these should be rare – the punishment framework is a set of guidelines that people should avoid.

Psychological (and biological) punishment

Punishment from the brain’s perspective, however, comes in others forms, namely that of needs violation. Those of you inducted into SCOAP know that these five needs of Self-esteem, Control, Orientation, Attachment, and Pleasure form the basis of human beings. Leaders and those in authority often punish not intentionally, but often inadvertently in the form of needs violations: over criticism, putting people down, taking away control, or minimising pleasure. These are all actions that can be considered punishment from the brain’s perspective but are often not considered “formal” punishment. The seriousness of needs violation is supported by well-documented biological impacts, the first of which is increased stress, cortisol release (and whole set of behavioural changes and limitation of cognitive abilities), and the worst of which, over time, and if severe enough, are disrupted neuronal growth, and destruction of brain matter.

When I speak to business leaders about this they feel that they can no longer criticise people – I stress this is not about not focusing on performance issues. If someone underperforms, inform them quickly, respectfully, on precisely what, and enable them to perform better next time. Note, in addition, that some research has shown that confident people respond well to positive feedback but minimise negative feedback. Alternately those lower in confidence focus more on the negative feedback intended or not. That could be the subject for another article. This means that you may need to rebalance your feedback to individuals depending on their confidence and self-esteem ratings.

Stretch as a better predictor?

In developing our Human Behavioural Framework, we included many aspects – but as proposed by Carver, we see Behavioural Activation and Behavioural Inhibition as foundational personality traits that guide a lot of human behaviour. We therefore measure BAS/BIS using items from the BAS/BIS scale. This is not the same as the way we measured emotional responses to needs in the SCOAP-Profile as outlined above.

In a group of high-performing teachers one of the best predictors was not the height of these scales but the relationship. So, if BAS was higher than BIS it was a strong indicator of higher performance. These high-performing teachers were therefore less worried about negative affects, making mistakes, or failing. This is a similar pattern that we noticed in the corporate space also.

However, what is striking, and probably unsurprising, is the difference between start-ups and corporate leaders. We have a good set of data from startup founders and see that they are off the scale when to comes to BAS vs BIS. Their BAS ratings are very high, their BIS ratings are very low. Compare this to corporate leaders and we see these two converging – or even being reversed. This is interesting because some of these corporate leaders also claim to be “entrepreneurial” and suggest that their people or organisations should be more “entrepreneurial”.

 We therefore compare these two ratings together because this is more predictive and call this “Stretch”. This is more predictive of performance we see but also of agile mindsets as outlined in article on agility.

 

Let’s summarise

Carrots – reward

  • Small spontaneous rewards are very effective and underused in the corporate world
  • Reward is particularly motivating for BAS (achievement focused individuals)
  • Emotional needs fulfilment is the most critical aspect of deep reward (Self-Esteem, Control, Orientation, Attachment, and Pleasure). So, doing more of the cheap but important stuff like showing appreciation is more important than many assume.
  • Large short-term rewards can increase stress and therefore decrease performance.
  • Large long-term rewards with enough planning and preparation time normally increases quality and motivation.
  • Creating a safe environment is critical for everyone but particularly for BIS (inhibition focused) individuals.
  • A safe environment means a place where everyone can fulfil their needs, not feel threatened, and not have their needs violated or damaged by other team members.

Sticks – punishment

  • Rather than punishment, think of requirements and guidelines
  • Bad behaviour must be dealt with immediately and fairly
  • Bad performance requires clear immediate feedback and enablement. Criticize the task and not the person.
  • With confident people, they will minimize the negative feedback and focus on the positive (you may need to re-address the balance).
  • Less confident people will maximise the negative feedback, and minimise positive. Focus on task and enabling the person.
  • Short-term threats increase stress and reduce cognitive ability and normally reduce performance
  • Shock effects only work when everyone has become complacent (how did you let it get this way in the first place?).
  • Be careful of inadvertently punishing people by violating their SCOAP needs.

So, in short, the answer is, as usual, there is a bit of truth in the classic statement of using carrots and sticks but a careful review shows why and in what people. In team leadership it is therefore critical to know your people to enable high performance in the whole team. Carrots do work for the right people and some carrots are surprisingly effective but underused – the spontaneous small reward. Similarly, we should not think of punishing people but creating the guidelines for accepted behaviour and respond swiftly and appropriately when this is crossed – when it comes to performance issues, similarly a swift response, respecting the person and enabling high performance is critical. So, let’s call it carrots, fulfilling needs, and guidance●

Relationship of BIS and BAS as a predictor of performance

When we first developed the SCOAP profile, we measured how much of something an individual wanted (in the SCOAP -Profile, the fulfilment of needs) and how negatively they responded to violation of a need. We initially predicated that high performers would be high on achievement (i.e. approach motivation or BAS). But we found that they were high on both. This indicates a high desire to win but a high desire not to lose at the same time. There are therefore two motivational drives that are guiding motivation.

When we compared this to a group of producers in a larger company, we saw significant differences in intensity of motivation and also height of both positive and negative – in fact standard or lower performers had a lower response to the negative. This could also be learned helplessness i.e. just being used to negativity.

References

Approach / Avoidance

Aupperle, R. L., and Paulus, M. P. (2010). Neural systems underlying approach and avoidance in anxiety disorders. Dialogues Clin. Neurosci. 12, 517–31.

Bartels, J. M., and Magun-Jackson, S. (2009). Approach-avoidance motivation and metacognitive self-regulation: The role of need for achievement and fear of failure. Learn. Individ. Differ. 19. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2009.03.008.

Carver, C. S. (2006). Approach, avoidance, and the self-regulation of affect and action. Motiv. Emot. 30, 105–110.

Corr, P. J., and McNaughton, N. (2012). Neuroscience and approach/avoidance personality traits: a two stage (valuation-motivation) approach. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 36, 2339–54. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.09.013.

Elliot, A. J., and Covington, M. V. (2001). Approach and Avoidance Motivation. Educ. Psychol. Rev. 13, 73–92.

Elliot, A. J. (2006). The Hierarchical Model of Approach-Avoidance Motivation. Motiv. Emot. 30, 111–116. doi:10.1007/s11031-006-9028-7.

Hamamura, T., and Heine, S. J. (2008). “Approach and avoidance motivation across cultures.,” in Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation, 557–570.

Spielberg, J. M., Miller, G. A., Warren, S. L., Engels, A. S., Crocker, L. D., Banich, M. T., et al. (2012). A brain network instantiating approach and avoidance motivation. Psychophysiology 49, 1200–1214.

Terry, W. S. (2010). A Demonstration of Approach and Avoidance Conflicts. Teach. Psychol. 37, 132–134. doi:10.1080/00986281003626888.

 

Reward Punishment

Fischbacher, U., Treyer, V., Schellhammer, M., Schnyder, U., Buck, A., and Fehr, E. (2009). Neuroscience: The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment. Science (80-. ). 305, 1254–1257.

Knoch, D., Gianotti, L. R., Baumgartner, T., and Fehr, E. (2010). A Neural Marker of Costly Punishment Behavior. Psychol. Sci. 21, 337–342.

Nakatani, Y., Matsumoto, Y., Mori, Y., Hirashima, D., Nishino, H., Arikawa, K., et al. (2009). Why the carrot is more effective than the stick: different dynamics of punishment memory and reward memory and its possible biological basis. Neurobiol. Learn. Mem. 92, 370–380.

Seymour, B., Singer, T., and Dolan, R. (2007). The neurobiology of punishment. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 8, 300–11.

 

Personality

Dickson, J. M. (2006). Perceived consequences underlying approach goals and avoidance goals in relation to anxiety. Pers. Individ. Dif. 41, 1527–1538.

Elliot, A. J., and Thrash, T. M. (2010). Approach and Avoidance Temperament as Basic Dimensions of Personality. J. Pers. 78, 865–906.

Strauman, T. J., and Wilson, W. A. (2010). “Individual differences in approach and avoidance: behavioral activation/inhibition and regulatory focus as distinct levels of analysis,” in Handbook of Personality and SelfRegulation, ed. R. H. Hoyle (Blackwell), 447–473.

 

Feedback

Brown, J. D. (2010). High self-esteem buffers negative feedback: Once more with feeling. Cogn. Emot. 24, 1389–1404. doi:10.1080/02699930903504405.

Somerville, L. H., Kelley, W. M., and Heatherton, T. F. (2010). Self-esteem modulates medial prefrontal cortical responses to evaluative social feedback. Cereb. Cortex 20, 3005–3013.

Belschak, F. D., and Den Hartog, D. N. (2009). Consequences of positive and negative feedback: The impact on emotions and extra-role behaviors. Appl. Psychol. 58, 274–303.

And again: Overconfidently underthinking: narcissism negatively predicts cognitive reflection

This is the title of a 2020 paper relating cognitive reflection to other personality traits. This is well worth a read, but they measure multiple forms of cognition, reflection, various forms of narcissism, impulsiveness, and overconfidence. The big take away though was that those high in grandiose narcissism, claim to enjoy engaging in cognitive tasks, but are massively high on overconfidence, and show lower reflective abilities and insight.

So those arrogant individuals who have a high regard for themselves and their superiority will tend to fall into thinking traps more often but be overconfident in their abilities to avoid them and be unable to acknowledge and think through how they could have made a better decision. Many people in business reading this will be slowly nodding their heads having come across many people like this…

Littrell, S., Fugelsang, J., and Risko, E. F. (2020). Overconfidently underthinking: narcissism negatively predicts cognitive reflection. Think. Reason. doi:10.1080/13546783.2019.1633404.

The Average Performers Who Enable High Performance

The Average Performers Who Enable High Performance

by | 2021 Jan 18 | Business Brains, Feature, Organisational Leadership, Senior Leadership, Team Leadership

Reading time: about 12 minutes

Many sports coaches know it – there are some team members, who may be unspectacular, but the whole team just functions better with them. But no one knows how to measure it and big data is not helping – or is it?

high performance brain

The standard logic in business and sports is that to get high-performing teams you should hire a bunch of high-performing individuals or even stars. In the sports world we are fascinated by this with fantasy teams of the best-ever teams of the best-ever players.

But the problem is that team performance is more than just the sum of the parts. For those who are familiar with rugby, which may not be many of you, every four years there is what is known as the British and Irish Lions tour. This is an old tradition and is considered one of the pinnacles of a rugby career – to play for and win with the Lions or play against and beat the Lions. In some ways more important and illustrious than the more recently introduced World Cup.

The fascinating thing is that logically the British and Irish Lions should thrash any team they come across. The players are selected from four of the biggest and most talented rugby nations on the planet (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland). So, picking the most talented players from a talent pool four times the size for any national team should provide an extremely talented team. And yet, despite this, the Lions winning against another national team is a big thing and far from a foregone conclusion.

They selectively tour one of the southern hemisphere countries: South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand. On balance their chance of winning is only about 50/50 probability similar to if any one of the national teams were to independently tour. What’s more, as part of the Lions tour, they also play club or provincial teams – teams a step down on the pecking order of a national team and yet, surprisingly, maybe, they do not win all the time, or rather, they lose regularly.

This shows that despite having rich pickings of talent from four elite national teams they do not necessarily perform better than any one national team and still fail to beat lowly club teams.

The question is why not, and what is the difference?

Another question is that of the unspectacular person on the team who somehow enables high team performance. In his insightful article ‘The No-Stats All-Star’ in The New York Times Magazine in 2009, Michael Lewis captured the essence of the problem. Writing about the US National Basketball Association (NBA) player Shane Battier, he notes:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

The above story of Battier is fascinating because he was consistently classed as an underperformer, and quoted as “at best a marginal N.B.A. player”. His stats on the things that N.B.A. teams measure such as points and rebounds, were terrible. On paper he was a massive underperformer, but somehow when he was on the field everyone else performed better. The article that the above quote is taken from goes into a lot more depth on the refinement of statistical approaches and under some of these characteristics, or rather, better forms of statistical analysis, Battier does show up. For example, the greatest players all under perform when guarded by Battier. This may makes good reading for another article on statistical analysis or what we quoted in the previous article of “you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask” or my concept of non-information.

There are now a number of issues to approach in the above examples.

    • Groups of higher performers do not necessarily (and often don’t) make high performing teams.
    • And that unspectacular performers, to the external eye, and to most statistical analysis, can enable teams to perform much better.

The question now in business, is how can we identify these, and can we reward them also? Or simpler how can we put together high-performing teams. And more than that how do we define “talent”?

team performanceSome of the clues may come in series of experiments on creativity. Tom Wujec is well known for his Ted talk on creativity using spaghetti and a marshmallow (a fun activity by the way) – the short video is well worth watching. The insights from these tasks are worth paying attention to. Notable is that kindergarten children were very effective but took a completely different approach to problem solving – worth saving for future articles on creativity – MBA graduates were terrible, and CEOs were also unspectacular.

Now let’s assume for the sake of argument, and there could be a lot of argument, that CEO’s and MBA graduates represent “talent”. Now not strictly true as Tom noted, thankfully, architects and engineers performed best and so were the most “talented”, giving thankful support, for the concept of being “an expert”. The CEOs and MBAs were ineffective because of using the wrong strategies – this is simply the problem of throwing a bunch of talented people together without thinking of team composition or what is known as complementarity. The insightful observation from Tom was that when he added an executive assistant to the teams of CEOs, their performance increased dramatically. Why?

He noted that communication and moderation increased. So, having a coordinator and communicator helped complementarity, and improved synchrony, another important facet of team performance. The assistants effectively functioned as enablers – similar to what Battier was doing – not worrying about their statistical performance but enabling others to perform better through managing communication and presumably also conflict effectively.

This is also neatly complemented by research into intelligence and collective problem solving by Woolley and colleagues: in a set of structured experiments teams were given collective problems solving tasks – tasks that required the team to solve a problem collectively. The outcome was that the team with the average highest IQ i.e. team packed with “talent” did not perform best, nor did the team with the person with the highest IQ, the top performer condition. So, who came out on top? The team with the best communication abilities, ability to listen and complement and interact with other people’s ideas. This again supports the concept of communication and enabling as being key factors to team performance. Women are more than interested to know that also simply having women in the team improved performance (of course you women knew that all along, didn’t you)!

There is more to team performance, the above is in collective problem-solving scenarios, which is not necessarily what every team is mandated to do, though arguably will always be a part of any team’s performance. Some of the other factors are not the focus of this article (see box at end). In summary team performance is very strongly influenced by other factors such as having a clear team, having clear roles, and clear goals. When I review teams in organisations, normally, this is the first thing I look at, and more often than not, the first thing that is wrong.

team high performanceBut in the case of Battier and the marshmallow exercise these were already given: the team was clear and the team goals also. But an important aspect of the research, often glossed over, is that individual competence was a predictor of individual productivity, but inter-team support was a better predictor of team productivity. Simply put, helping others in the team enables the team to perform better. This also points to a word of warning to those arrogant high performers. Though they may individually perform well, the question is how much do they diminish the performance of others? In sales teams, which are often loosely bundled teams, arrogant high performers may do little damage and create a lot of profit, but for interdisciplinary teams looking to create new solutions, the team damage is likely to override their individual ability.

This, however, doesn’t lead us into any insights of how to actually identify these people or team dynamics – obviously the intuitive amongst us will already have identified this and may make better decisions on team fit and include this in hiring decisions. But some research (unpublished) we did on successful and failed teams in the startup space gives us some intriguing theories of team performance. This could also give us better analytics such as in the example of Battier that showed with standard analytics he was an underperformer but when using more refined methods he was an exceptional performer.

We only measured personality with a view in our first mandate to give some ideas of how well-matched startup teams were. The reason for our first piece of research into this was the acknowledged importance of the team in enabling startups to succeed but an inability or unwillingness to measure this. So, what did our research show?

First off, we looked at the concept of homophily. This is the concept that similar personalities get on well with each other. We set some cut-off points and first off, we could see that areas of conflict that we predicted with high variation in personality, was well-supported.

team high performanceHowever, there is a problem with this because of the two concepts I mentioned previously. Namely synchrony can be seen as how similar in personality, or mindset, individuals are, but complementarity is the concept of having differing but complementary skills or personality traits. These are seemingly contrasting aspects. Though many leaders proudly claim they have diverse teams, our research shows they are not as diverse as they like to think, because they may be similar in multiple aspects of personality. Before I digress too far, I am sure you are keen to learn of what else we discovered in personality and effective teams.

Well, we found that:

    • Similarity in personality predicted cohesion
    • Differences in personality were well accepted best when only in limited areas. So, the larger the differences, and the larger the number of traits that differed, the worse the team cohesion.
    • Extreme differences can cause conflict particularly when in multiple areas.
    • Polarisation was an important aspect of team conflict i.e. when two members were high in a trait and another very low.
    • Individualisation of polarisation – when a single person is an outlier it can lead to this person being left out, when it is multiple this person can be totally polarised.
    • Large variations, if evenly distributed, can lead to cohesion but slow decision making. So, the opposite of homophily when there is wide but nicely distributed spread there may be some underlying conflict, but everyone balances each other out. Complementarity in short
    • Mindset caused large disruptions. For example, we mapped team members to corporate mindset, based on traits that support classic corporate thinking, and startup mindset, and this was very predictive of conflict and team breakup in the startup scenarios.
    • Some traits seemed more predictive than others e.g. multiple personalities high on dominance was a recipe for conflict
    • “Typing” (such as classic personality assessment humanistic vs. cognitive types) is too general and much less effective than including multiple different single traits

From this we developed a coherence figure including the above multiple inputs – but this can only be understood as a rough guide to team cohesion because a team has many moving parts. Roles, as we said, play a key importance and being effective in roles is critical for cohesion and conflict minimisation – we don’t measure this. Similarly, leadership and reporting structures will also guide potential for conflict.

What we also found, however, is that there are also moderating traits that minimise the risk of conflict. These includes, openness, and humour and those individuals who are high in intuition and high in cognition, helping to mitigate between these two contrasting viewpoints.

With the question of how to identify those average performers who enable high performance, let me show you what happens when we remove one person from a team.

Here you can see two teams along two separate personality traits (note that we measure up to 72 personality traits with our HBF tool – but normally only 28 for team cohesion). What you can see is a distribution of personalities along a scale. This team is therefore, based on this one trait, likely to differ significantly in how they approach problems and see the world but there are a range of personalities so there are those in the middle who will moderate others and act as communicators between the two. Decision-making may be slow but could be effective.

personality team performance

Team with balanced personality distribution

However, if we move one person out of the team, in each case the middle person, we now suddenly have a polarized team with two groupings and high and low ends of the scale. Polarisation was one of the biggest predictors in our data for team conflict. So, by removing one person from the team we have now created the potential for more conflict. This could therefore be the unspectacular performer who unbeknownst to others helps moderate conflict.

team high performance

Team with moderating personality removed and with increased polarisation

The level of polarisation in the above is not extreme, here another example from the real world with very high polarisation:

team high performance

A highly polarised team

 

So where does this leave us? Let me summarise

    1. A collection of talent or high performers does not make a high performing team
    2. Synchrony and complementarity are critical to team performance
    3. These can be measured and mapped but never are
    4. Communication skills are critical
    5. The team leader is responsible for managing this complementarity and synchrony
    6. Personality awareness can improve synchrony and complementarity
    7. Level of inter-team support is predictive of team performance
    8. Don’t forget the other obvious factors such as clear roles and clear goals

In short, when looking to build high-performing teams look to high synchrony and high complementarity (over, and with, “high talent”), measure this, build awareness, encourage open communication. And, food for another article another day,  you need a team leader who can manage and lead this effectively.

The corporate problem is that many organisations seem unaware of these team performance issues, still focusing on getting “talent” and measuring individual performance. A question to ask, is how to measure, and value team performers, and how do you reward those individuals who may be unspectacular but somehow keep the team rolling? A good start is to measure team cohesion but also to identify those who are the enablers in the team and have high inter-team behaviours – they may be worth a lot more than you think●

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Research into team performance

Research into team performance is long but notoriously difficult to research with so many moving parts in the real world. The military has provided the basis for a bunch of research because of their clear structure of teams and clear goals.

Some of the interesting and often underrated factors that come out of this research is: first off do you actually have a team? A team must be a coherent unit, stable overtime, have interdependences and have collective goals. Everyone agrees on that, but different researchers define them differently.

Similarly, the boring stuff is very important – clear roles and clear goals and the skills to perform the tasks. Nothing spectacular there but in modern matrixed global organisations, roles and responsibilities can become diffuse and large, with people wearing many hats.

Other more recent work that has become a main stock of team workshops has been the well-known work done by Google internally finding, to their surprise, but not to any psychologist or sociologist, that psychological safety was a key factor, as was leadership and particularly coaching by the team leader.

Context plays a role and the synchrony effect we speak about in the article is highest when teams have less well-defined roles and high interdependencies, but with less interdependencies and very structured roles, is less important. Similarly, synchrony has been shown to predict short-term success in entrepreneurial settings but complementarity, diversity, has been shown to be better for long-term success.

Using HBF to measure team cohesion

We specifically developed the HBF to measure team cohesion. Our report shows cohesion factors, blindspot risks where synchrony is high, but also friction risk where personality diversity is high. These are only potential risks, and managing them is up to the team. The report therefore provides a valuable way to frame this information and provide a basis to build awareness and discussions around how to improve team efficacy.

team cohesion

Detailed Mapping: Overview of how all team members map on each personality trait. You can identify moderators and enablers here.

And again: Overconfidently underthinking: narcissism negatively predicts cognitive reflection

This is the title of a 2020 paper relating cognitive reflection to other personality traits. This is well worth a read, but they measure multiple forms of cognition, reflection, various forms of narcissism, impulsiveness, and overconfidence. The big take away though was that those high in grandiose narcissism, claim to enjoy engaging in cognitive tasks, but are massively high on overconfidence, and show lower reflective abilities and insight.

So those arrogant individuals who have a high regard for themselves and their superiority will tend to fall into thinking traps more often but be overconfident in their abilities to avoid them and be unable to acknowledge and think through how they could have made a better decision. Many people in business reading this will be slowly nodding their heads having come across many people like this…

Littrell, S., Fugelsang, J., and Risko, E. F. (2020). Overconfidently underthinking: narcissism negatively predicts cognitive reflection. Think. Reason. doi:10.1080/13546783.2019.1633404.

Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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References

Referenced articles

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html

https://aeon.co/essays/what-complexity-science-says-about-what-makes-a-winning-team

Team performance

Burke, C.S. et al., 2006. What type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. Leadership Quarterly.

Ceri-Booms, M., Curşeu, P.L. & Oerlemans, L.A.G., 2017. Task and person-focused leadership behaviors and team performance: A meta-analysis. Human Resource Management Review.

Charan, R., Drotter, S. & Noel, J., 2011. The Leadership Pipeline: How to build the leadership powered company 2nd ed., San Francisco: Jossey-Boss.

Coutu, D., 2009. Why Teams Don’t Work–An Interview with J. Richard Hackman. Harvard Business Review.

Google (2019). Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness. re:Work https://rework.withgoogle.com. doi:.1037//0033-2909.I26.1.78.

Gully, S.M. et al., 2002. A meta-analysis of team-efficacy, potency, and performance: Interdependence and level of analysis as moderators of observed relationships. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(5), pp.819–832.

Hackman, J.R., 2002. A Real Team. In Harvard Business School Press.

Hackman, J.R. & Connor, M.O., 2004. What Makes for a Great Analytic Team? Individual vs. Team Approaches to Intelligence Analysis. Intelligence.

Kozlowski, S.W.J. & Bell, B.S., 2012. Work Groups and Teams in Organizations. In Handbook of Psychology, Second Edition. pp. 412–460.

Morgeson, F.P., DeRue, D.S. & Karam, E.P., 2010. Leadership in Teams: A Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes. Journal of Management.

Creativity and Intelligence

Somech, A., and Drach-Zahavy, A. (2013). Translating Team Creativity to Innovation Implementation: The Role of Team Composition and Climate for Innovation. J. Manage. doi:10.1177/0149206310394187.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science 330, 686–688. doi:10.1126/science.1193147.

Wujec, T. (2010). The Marshmallow Challenge. Marshmallow Challenge- TED TALK.

Homophily, Synchrony, and Complementarity

Antonenko, P. D., Davis, R., Wang, J., and Celepkolu, M. (2019). On the Same Wavelength: Exploring Team Neurosynchrony in Undergraduate Dyads Solving a Cyberlearning Problem With Collaborative Scripts. Mind, Brain, Educ. doi:10.1111/mbe.12187.

Aven, B., and Hillmann, H. (2018). Structural role complementarity in entrepreneurial teams. Manage. Sci. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2017.2874.

Gompers, P. A., Huang, K., and Wang, S. Q. (2017). Homophily in Entrepreneurial Team Formation. SSRN Electron. J. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2973329.

Hu, J., and Judge, T. A. (2017). Leader-team complementarity: Exploring the interactive effects of leader personality traits and team power distance values on team processes and performance. J. Appl. Psychol. doi:10.1037/apl0000203.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., and Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annu. Rev. Sociol. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415.

Mønster, D., Håkonsson, D. D., Eskildsen, J. K., and Wallot, S. (2016). Physiological evidence of interpersonal dynamics in a cooperative production task. Physiol. Behav. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2016.01.004.

Reinero, D. A., Dikker, S., and Van Bavel, J. J. (2021). Inter-brain synchrony in teams predicts collective performance. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa135.

Ruef, M., Aldrich, H. E., and Carter, N. M. (2003). The structure of founding teams: Homophily, strong ties, and isolation among U.S. entrepreneurs. Am. Sociol. Rev. doi:10.2307/1519766.

Smith, D. M. (2018). Collective Synchrony in Team Sports. ProQuest Diss. Theses.

Steffens, P., Terjesen, S., and Davidsson, P. (2012). Birds of a feather get lost together: New venture team composition and performance. Small Bus. Econ. doi:10.1007/s11187-011-9358-z.

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