As mentioned in the previous article, organizational psychology knows a great deal about processes with negative impact on trust, cooperation and collaboration.
This article is devoted to the practices and approaches which turn teams into groups by hurting interdependence, cooperation and trust.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming called focus on individual performance one of the seven deadly diseases:
Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.
The reason for such a harsh description was that focusing on individual performance introduces competition between members of the group, which, as stated in the previous article, is detrimental to cooperation and therefore teamwork.
Imagine a hunting team aiming to kill a mammoth: what are the chances the team could succeed if the individuals were competing instead of cooperation?
Individually distributed bonuses make the situation even worse. The calculation of individual bonuses is based on determining the individual contribution to the common result, which is only possible in a group setting (remember the hunting group?). It is not possible to calculate individual contribution in a team setting where the common result is a synergistic product of collaborative efforts of interdependent actors (the hunting team). In the hunting team, any individual’s input is interwoven with the inputs of others and is amplified or diminished by these interactions. There’s no way to measure how much hunter 1 helped hunter 2 realize his plan, or how quickly hunter 3 noticed the mammoth needed more distraction since hunter 4 was just about to attack.
As soon as individual input is measured, the interactions are neglected. When bonuses are granted for “individual performance”, they work as social appreciation for the efforts for which the bonus is granted. Humans are social animals; we are motivated by social appreciation. The motivation brought by bonuses is short-term and deteriorates quickly, and it inevitably changes our behavior to achieve exactly what the bonuses are granted for. When the hunter is granted a bonus for, say, the number of spear strikes delivered to the mammoth, his main motivation becomes to deliver as many strikes as possible, at the expense of helping his teammate. Hence, the interactions are neglected, interdependence and trust weaken, the team deteriorates to a mere group, and the emergent quality of a super-result disappears. It is much harder to maintain a team in the presence of individual bonuses.
Additionally, interactions can’t be reduced to actions. When the distraction specialist in the team is set with a KPI of the number of times he jumped and waved his hands, he will be focused on achieving that number instead of interacting with the attacking specialists to achieve the common goal through cooperation. Even the commonality of the goal is diminished by the mere presence of individual KPIs.
Some companies also practice gamification, which is also detrimental to cooperation since it fosters individual competition.
With regards to trust, KPIs are also detrimental. Trust by definition means that the reciprocity is only expected by the trustor: there’s no way for the attacking hunter to sign a contract with the distracting specialist with all the types of actions he expects. The attacking hunter simply presumes they both cooperate and that the distracting hunter can be trusted to act in the best interests of the team.
A manager providing individual employees with KPIs shows their distrust in employees. Employees seeing they aren’t trusted, will play along, and the team will reduce to a mere group of individuals.
In social sciences, the effects of KPIs and other reductionist interventions are well-described in the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
Regular 1-1 interventions are usually conducted for a reason: the manager aims to “help the team.” However, these meetings are with individuals, hence the term “one on one.” As soon as a manager establishes that an employee’s problems are being resolved in 1-1 sessions with them, and then proceeds to solve these emerging problems, they reinforce the pattern of employees solving problems with the manager rather than the team solving problems together. No matter how hard the manager tries to “build a team”, if their actions demonstrate that problems are effectively solved by the manager-employee pair, there’s a high probability that the group will never evolve into a cohesive team.
Imagine a hunting team needing a manager to facilitate their interactions; such a team would not only be unfit for hunting but would also be easily overwhelmed by the first mammoth they encounter.
Regular 1-1 meetings resemble micromanagement:
some managers will respond to complexity by increasing levels of control over team members and workplace practices (Chuang, Kendra, & Craft, 2011). Managers with such controlling behaviors are sometimes known as micromanagers, especially when the control they wield over staff is preoccupied with the minutiae or minor details of day-to-day workplace operations (White, 2010)
Traditional methods in project management and software engineering typically involve breaking projects or problems into individual tasks, assigning them to specific disciplines to work on independently, and then merging the completed work. Tim Ottinger MENTION TIM!!!! discusses the inherent problems of such an approach in his “Scatter-gather” piece, particularly from a productivity perspective. However, I believe that this effort coordination is inefficient partly because it reduces a team to a mere group.
Take a hunting team as an example: they can only successfully hunt a mammoth if they work cohesively. Interdependence implies that decision-making occurs without delay. For instance, if a hunter is wounded, other team members immediately protect him, eliminating the need for supervision, and his role is swiftly assumed by another team member. In software development, the cost of delays is significant, often resulting from queues caused by coordination being handled externally to the team.
When a manager handles the coordination of efforts, the interdependence among team members diminishes. This leads to increased delays in decision-making and causes the team to deteriorate into a group, resulting in a significant loss of efficiency.
Refer to my article on mob programming for further insight.
This article examines various types of interventions that managers often undertake, which inadvertently lead to teams being reduced to mere groups.
The next article will focus on the negative social dynamics triggered by various aspects of organizational design, process activities, and certain managerial actions.
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