Kentaro Toyama :
Most of us engage in some kind of teamwork, whether it’s for projects at the office, coordination for a community event, or organising a birthday party. But, what makes for an effective team? Good teamwork, of course, is an essential skill for students to learn – to do well in the course, to satisfy their clients, to complete their degree, and to succeed in their careers. But, the class is not primarily about teamwork – the students’ core interest is information science – so early in the course, I cram in the best, practical, evidence-based advice for teams that I’m aware of.
And that advice is: Communicate with one other, and ensure that every team member participates in discussion. Individual members of any team can help the team do better overall. If you tend to be quiet, try to speak up more; if you tend to be vocal, hold yourself back a bit, and invite input from other teammates.
Research on teamwork goes back decades in organisational psychology, even before a landmark 1965 paper by Bruce Tuckman whose rhymed labels for the four stages of team evolution – forming, storming, norming, and performing – are a staple of management training workshops. But, it was only in 2010 that researchers identified a single quality of teams that contributes – possibly more so than any other quality – to good team function. Woolley had teams of two to five people perform a series of team tasks ranging from the kinds of questions asked in IQ tests to more complex tasks like designing a house with blocks while meeting building codes. The participants also took established tests of intelligence, personality, and social sensitivity, and scored how they felt about their teams. Finally, audio recordings of the teams were analysed to determine how much each team member spoke. Factor analysis was performed to identify what most correlated with team performance on the tasks.
I should mention that “social sensitivity” – the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings – was measured by a curious assessment tool known as Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME). This instrument was developed by psychologists as a way to evaluate people on the autism spectrum, who are known to have difficulty reading others’ emotions. The test presents subjects with black-and-white cropped photographs of people’s eyes and asks them to choose the emotion expressed in them from among multiple choice options. Of the variables it was found that three things best predicted a team’s performance: its average social sensitivity score, the proportion of women on the team, and the degree to which each team member’s voice was heard in discussion. These three factors are closely related and probably have a lot to do with a team’s average ability to read one another’s mental states. It turns out that the women’s advantage is largely explained by their superior social sensitivity. And, it seems reasonable that higher social sensitivity might lead to teams with more balanced discussion, as more active members sense their quieter peers’ reservation and explicitly seek their input.
What happens, though, when teams interact virtually, as real-world teams increasingly do? This is where the story becomes really interesting. To investigate this, three co-authors of the original Woolley paper collaborated on a follow up study with some other colleagues. A repeat of the experiment came with a twist; instead of having teams work in a face-to-face environment, the teams performed their tasks entirely online, through a text-chat mediated interface. Their results largely confirm the results from Woolley. They find that among the traits they measured, a team’s average RME scores correlate most with overall team performance. What’s striking is that a test that depends on looking at images of people’s eyes somehow predicts team performance even when team members can’t see one another.
It seems likely that people with high social sensitivity have a deeper set of habits – being observant about emotional cues; putting oneself in another person’s shoes; reading between the lines in any form of communication – that manifests as the ability to read emotions in the eyes, as well as perhaps to know the difference between ‘fine’ and ‘fine!’ in a text chat. Luckily, social sensitivity can be improved, and its lessons easily applied to teams: Communicate more with each other, and make sure everyone’s voice is heard.
(Kentaro Toyama is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. Psychology Today).
