No I in Team? Think again
We live in the age of teams with complex activities requiring careful coordination and specialists across multiple disciplines. Distinct, yet interdependent teams are hard at work across almost any organization, from research teams collaborating on Covid vaccines, to construction projects coordinating trades and specialists, and insurance organizations’ sales, underwriting, and issuance teams working hand-in-glove to meet customer needs. Companies now regularly function as multiteam systems that require information to be shared across interdependent teams in different functional areas. Employees wear multiple hats and maintain multiple workplace identities including membership in their immediate work team as well as their place in the larger organization. It turns out that there are significant implications for leaders based on the which identity their people favor. According to new research published in the October Academy of Management Journal, the I in team is all about how individuals identify with the organization.
The study’s authors utilized an empirical and experimental approach across three separate research studies to examine what happens when employees consider their primary identity to be at the team level or at the system level. Team-level employees think of themselves first as members of their immediate project team, work group, or department. By contrast, system-level employees identify as members of the larger organization first. The authors examined performance and communication between interdependent teams to see what happens when teams of employees work with teams that share similar and different organizational identities. Their findings were striking:
Predictably, information sharing between teams positively predicted end-to-end performance across all teams.
Teams with mostly system-focused employees, who identified with the larger organization, shared information with all other teams as dictated by their work.
However, teams made up mostly of employees whose identity prioritized their team over their place in the larger organization showed a marked preference for sharing information with teams that were like them. They shared more information with other team-focused teams than they shared with system-focused teams.
It is tempting to look at the results of this study and conclude that teams of people simply work best with people like themselves and that differences in organizational identification should be avoided. However, that would be an oversimplification of the study’s implications and is hardly practical advice for organizational leaders operating in a complex environment. Instead, the study suggests that proactive culture-building may be the best way to insulate organizations against negative communication effects caused by interdependent teams with mismatched identifications. There are several ways to address this:
Shift your firm’s culture around information sharing away from “need-to-know” policies in favor of “duty to inform” or “responsibility to provide.” In no way does this imply a lax attitude toward data security. On the contrary, focusing on the duty to inform or responsibility to provide data to other teams allows organizations to clarify their policies and keep their data secure. It creates opportunities to be explicitly clear about what data must be shared, under what circumstances, and to identify the mechanisms and processes to be used when sharing information between teams.
Create awareness in your leadership team about when mismatches in team identity are most likely to occur so that they can equip their people and mid-level leaders to mitigate it. Likely circumstances include situations where teams that are central to your organizational workflow are working with peripheral teams, situations in which a colocated home-office team work with a team that is spread out over multiple locations or whose members primarily telecommute. In addition, differences in the team’s direct leader or supervisor have an enormous impact. When the supervisor of one team focuses language and rhetoric at the team-level and the supervisor of another team focuses at the system-level, the odds of a mismatch between their people are drastically increased.
In the short run, building a “duty to inform” into the culture of an organization will help bolster communication between mismatched teams. It will also set the stage to favor the development of system-focused teams whose members’ identities prioritize membership in the firm over their membership in the team. This transition is likely to cause some friction as team member attitudes will change at different rates across the organization. In addition, some managers may struggle to cope with the idea or feeling that “their people” are shifting allegiance from the team identify to an organizational identity. However, the finding that system-level teams have the ability to share information equally with all partner teams suggests greater flexibility to work with others. Shifting the balance in favor of system-level teams over team-level teams will benefit the organization in the long run but the change will come with some growing pains.
Be prepared for things to get worse before they get better. Team-focused teams have a marked tendency to withhold information from system-focused teams. While firm-level teams offer more flexibility in the long run, shifting the culture within your organization will likely increase the number of mismatched teams in the short run leading to a temporary decrease in intra-team communications. Senior leaders should consider proactive strategies to help combat these breakdowns and encourage the desired culture shift.
Create or bolster existing cross-functional groups such as employee advisory panels, peer-leadership round tables, or other internal bodies tasked with monitoring and reporting on the end-to-end status and performance of organizational tasks that span multiple teams and functional areas. These types of superordinate entities within the organization play a critical role by providing a focal point for firm-level identify formation while providing leaders with a mechanism to gather and assess intra-team communication and performance.
Research suggests that there is an I in team and you can use it to help shape a high-performance culture for your organization. The ride will be bumpy, but you can shape and encourage employee identification to your firm’s advantage as you position your people to communicate more effectively and drive performance. Leaders choose which level to encourage through their rhetoric, policies, and operational decisions. It is not easy, but it is worth it. Knowledgeable perspective can help.
Let’s get to work!
