Put five, eight, twelve or more people together in a room, and it's a game of luck as to how well they'll function as a team. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes. It's a lot like dining out with a bunch of friends. Where to go? Italian? Vegetarian? Steakhouse? Each person has their own appetite, which can make creating a "shared-interest" extremely challenging.
Shared-interest is the lifeblood of teams, and only the most successful companies know how to foster it. But how?
"Project Aristotle", an experiment led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google's People Analytics division was conducted in 2012 to discover how to build the "perfect team." After years of analyzing data and interviews from more than 180 teams across the company, Google found that the individual personalities in a team are not so relevant.
"We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The 'who' part of the equation didn't seem to matter," Dubey said in an interview with The New York Times. Instead, the researchers found that there were five key characteristics of enhanced teams:
Psychological safety: Everyone feels safe in taking risks, and that they won't be embarrassed or punished for doing so.
Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.
Structure and clarity: Everyone knows what their specific expectations are. These expectations must be challenging yet attainable.
Meaning: Everyone has a sense of purpose in their work, for example, supporting family.
Impact: Everyone sees that the result of their work actually contributes to the organization's overall goals.
While Google's findings may be true to some extent, a large number of scientific studies have caused researchers outside of Google's lab to shockingly disagree. Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at Columbia University and author of the book "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?" and psychologist Dave Winsborough are among them. They both claim that personality, in particular, heavily affects the role of an individual within a team and is indeed a significant factor in what makes a team successful.
Researchers found that the poorest-performing teams were 100 percent "pragmatic" (讲求实效的) and had 0 percent 'relationship-building' traits. "Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows," Chamorro-Premuzic and Winsborough co-wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. "This is why even the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player: There is no psychological synergy (协作). A more effective approach focuses as much on people's personalities as on their skills."
