Tag: team work

Giving guidance to your workers when they’ve tackled a task as a team can be a subtle, tricky art. Get it wrong, and you may put a staff member’s nose out of joint, demotivating them before the next team project. A new study, though, could offer some important hints as to how you can foster a sense of positive cooperation between employees when you deliver feedback. It’s all about avoiding pointing out differences among the workforce’s performance levels.

The research from Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business shows that giving performance feedback isn’t “just about driving individual effort; it can also shape team dynamics,” science news site Phys.org notes. To look into the effects, the experimenters set up tests that are roughly analogous to the kind of teamwork task your workers may do regularly, involving about 200 undergrad students and 300 working adults. The subjects had to tackle tricky tasks under different conditions: then some were shown their teammates performance “scores” while some were not, and some were told afterwards that they’d failed to achieve a challenging goal, while others were told they easily beat a simpler task. 

The report’s writer, Xinyu Zhang, an assistant professor at the business school, explained that the results are clear, though subtle. When workers receive feedback “indicating they performed similarly to their peers on a difficult task, they are more likely to collaborate afterward,” said Zhang. But if the feedback includes “rankings or highlights performance differences” between teammates, it can “reduce the sense of connection and hinder teamwork.”

Essentially the research boils down to creating a sense of community struggle. If you give workers performance guidance that makes them have a “sense of being ‘in the same boat,’” Zhang said, meaning you tell them that they’re all more or less performing at the same level, it’s the kind of experience that “strengthens social bonds and increases willingness to cooperate.”

The takeaway for your company is straightforward.

Zhang said that if you’re giving workers important tasks that rely on teamwork, then you should choose your feedback carefully and avoid comparing their performances with each other if there are clear differences. 

You can probably remember situations that align with this from your own working experience. For example, being told that while your team was tackling something difficult that, “Steve from Accounts actually worked much better on that than you did,” is going to be a demotivater, and make you disinclined to try hard to collaborate on future team tasks. Conversely, being told by a manager that you’re all pulling together really well, and they’re relying on you all to get the work done as a group could be a big confidence boost.

Zhang also drew some conclusions from the experiment that relate to a leadership staple: setting up a competitive atmosphere solely to try to motivate your workforce. Zhang suggests that this could actually have unintended side-effects rather than motivational, team-building benefits, Phys.org notes, particularly if there are already some very challenging targets set for the team to aim at.

As the Cornell Chronicle wrote in it’s summary of the study, the lesson for your company managers is that “sharing performance information among employees can foster cooperation, but only if the circumstances are right.” Simply, “Rank less, bond more.”