The Secret Power of Groups
Human society is built on sorting ourselves and others into groups.
Understanding human behavior means understanding group dynamics — the obvious and hidden ways in which our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by groups.
Our loyalty to our own groups and our villainy toward others permeate the stories that epitomize humanity.
Our ability to cooperate is the foundation of human accomplishment.
The secrets to getting the best from our groups — and from ourselves — are embedded within six conditions you can use to promote effective cooperation: composition, goals, tasks, norms, psychological safety, and coaching.
Seeing the world from a collective perspective is transformative.
Cooperation
The Myth of the Lone Genius | The Allure of Individualism in a Group-Based World
We’re suckers for stories of individual greatness — “Great Man” theories of genius and innovation. The lone genius is more myth than reality. Groups make the world go round.
In one of my favorite studies, titled “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge,” Northwestern University researchers Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi investigated whether groups produce more knowledge than individuals.
We can only speculate why teams appear to have gotten better — or individuals have gotten worse — at discovery and invention. Many scientists believe that the world is simply more complicated than it used to be.
The days of Renaissance polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci and Maria Sibylla Merian, a German illustrator and entomologist who taught the world about metamorphosis, might be over.
Our struggle to discern the role of groups in our lives is part of one of the most important discoveries of social psychology: the “fundamental attribution error.”
Group can refer to a spectrum of collections of individuals, from broad social categories to small teams.
Our inner sorting hats are laser-focused on finding potential patterns in collections of people. Unfortunately, this phenomenon of group perception has perhaps the worst name in all social science: “group entitativity.”
It’s pretty logical that these four clues — proximity, similarity, recognizable interaction patterns, and common fate — signal groupiness.
- At the lowest levels of groupiness are social categories: labels for shared attributes like introverts, foodies, or spelunkers.
- Crowds like the audience at Grow are groupier than social categories.
- A little groupier are co-acting groups, like people who work in a customer-service call center.
The classic definition of team was coined by my mentor and collaborator, the late J. Richard Hackman. He defined what it means to be a real team: a bounded collection of individuals that works interdependently toward a common purpose.
Real teams are humanity’s best tool for solving problems. But real teams are becoming an endangered species.
Our collective tendencies aren’t just weaker in our work lives; we’re living in an age of unprecedented individualism.
The Alchemy of Synergy | When Groups Are More (Or Less) Than the Sum of Their Parts
Synergy is when the collective outcome is greater than what you would predict from adding up individual capabilities. Proving the existence of synergy, however, has been complicated.
Back in 1882, a French agricultural engineer named Maximilien Ringelmann was obsessed with trying to figure out the optimal number of oxen to pull a cart. On average, each man in his study (they were all men) could pull about 188 pounds (85kg) when working alone. But when working in groups of seven, the men pulled a mere 143 pounds each (65kg). That’s only 76 percent of the sum of the parts — a decline of 24 percent!
As groups get larger, each individual contribution gets smaller. The effect is most pronounced in smaller groups, where adding, say, the fourth person to a three-person group leads to a big decrease in individual production.
In the 1970s, social psychologist Bibb Latané and his colleagues conducted a clever experiment to untangle the two pillars of group process: coordination and effort.
To prove that coordination wasn’t the only problem in group tasks, they used a task that required no coordination — cheering. Researchers then told the participants that they were either cheering alone, with one other person, or with five other people.
In pseudogroups of two, people cheered only 82 percent as loudly as when they believed they were shouting alone. And when they believed they were in groups of six, they hollered even less vigorously — only 74 percent as loudly as they did alone.
The researchers also compared pseudogroups to real interacting groups. Groups of two performed at 71 percent of their individual capacities, and groups of six at only 40 percent!
The funny thing is, many people don’t realize that they aren’t trying as hard as they can in groups, which Latané and colleagues named “social loafing.”
A meta-analysis of seventy-eight studies has confirmed that people try less hard in groups. The bigger the group, the less hard they try.
Groups create coordination challenges, and they lead to social loafing. Thus, many researchers began to believe that group synergy was a hoax.
In the 1970s, social psychologist Ivan Steiner formally proposed that synergy was a myth — and in doing so, restarted the search for it.
He distilled his theory of cooperation to the equation: AP = PP – PL. In English, this means the actual productivity of a group (AP) is equal to the potential productivity of members added together (PP) minus “process losses” (PL) — the lost productivity due to social loafing and coordination problems.
Process gains are just another (less catchy) way of saying “synergy.” They are times that groups would hypothetically improve upon what individuals would or could do alone.
One of the most important catalysts for synergy doesn’t have anything to do with the members’ characteristics or how the group interacts. It’s the work a group is trying to get done — the task.
For soulless corporate jargon, synergy is surprisingly apt when you think about it — its Greek derivatives literally mean “together – work.” Synergy is elusive because groups are open social systems, where members affect one another but the outside world still gets in.
More Than a One-Hit Wonder | How Groups Cooperate Effectively
Effective cooperation has two dimensions. First, to consider any cooperative endeavor effective, we need to factor in task performance — the extent to which the group accomplished the function or task it was composed for.
We also need to consider how group cooperation affects the humans involved. Specifically, how does cooperation shape group member’ well-being and willingness to work together again, which we’ll call member satisfaction?
Our evaluations of the social world always have an instrumental dimension that examines goal attainment and an emotional, relational dimension focused on liking, belonging, and pleasantness.
Effectiveness and synergy are related but not identical.
A meta-analysis of 169 different research studies, including more than eleven thousand teams, demonstrated that staying together leads to better task performance.
Many forward-looking organizations now talk about collaboration in terms of “multi-team systems” (that is, networks of teams), “cabals,” or “teaming” — ways of describing collaboration with looser boundaries and less formality.
Groups cooperate best when they’re more like real teams, which have two key advantages over groups with looser connections.
- First, real teams have bounded, stable membership.
- Second, real teams can have complex interdependence.
Real teams work because they satisfy all three of our core motivational drives: autonomy, belonging, and competence.
Prior to the 1970s, most people thought that motivation was mostly a function of individual traits — some people were simply more motivated and hardworking than others. But Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham thought that characteristics of the task itself might be just as important as, if not more than, personality or genetics for explaining work motivation.
A meta-analysis covering 259 different studies including 219,625 actual human beings found that Hackman and Oldham were right: Task characteristics are extremely powerful — they explain 34 percent of the variance in job performance and 55 percent of the variance in job satisfaction.
What are these fabled task characteristics? There are five of them: task variety, task identity, task significance, feedback, and autonomy.
Humans are motivated by autonomy — they got that right. But what programs like these often get wrong is that humans thrive on autonomy for how to achieve their goals, but cooperation requires agreement on what goals to achieve. For a chance at synergy, we need the ends of our cooperation to be clearly defined.
Famed US Army General George Patton had it right when he said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Task design is perhaps the most important — and most overlooked — condition for promoting synergy.
From Scream Team to Redeem Team | Launching Collaborations Beyond Team Building
USA Men’s Basketball has dominated the Olympics, winning every gold medal from 1992 until 2024. Except for 2004.
How could the most talented team in the tournament perform so poorly?
The 2004 team was more nightmare than dream — “the Scream Team,” as one ESPN headline put it.
One popular explanation for the 2004 Scream Team’s struggles was a lack of collective experience.
Many, many people associate improving team chemistry with team building.
Bruce Tuckman. In the 1960s, Tuckman came up with a model of group development that made sense at the time, but subsequent research has found misleading. Tuckman’s poetic prowess in naming the stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.
The Tuckman-orming model does a pretty good job of describing training groups, social clubs, and other groups that exist only for the benefit of their members. But using this model on real teams causes all sorts of problems.
A study by University of California organizational psychologist Barry Staw about how people appraise group dynamics. Groups that were randomly told they performed well reported being more cohesive, felt they communicated better, and were more open to change than groups that were randomly told they performed poorly. The lesson of Staw’s study is that our perceptions of task performance retroactively change how we think our group collaborated.
Contrary to Staw’s study, Tuckman’s-orming model posits that groups need to build trust and develop norms before they can perform a task (forming-storming-norming-performing).
Although it helps to have good relationships before cooperating, the best way to develop good relationships is to cooperate effectively!
When we cooperate well, it strengthens our relationships. When we cooperate poorly, it weakens them.
Too often, people try to build relationships first and cooperate second.
Synergy requires diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives.
From a synergy perspective, composing a group for surface-level diversity is a means to get to the second type: deep-level diversity. Deep-level diversity is about the actual differences in what people know, think, and do.
Both too little diversity and too much diversity can harm cooperation.
Any kind of diversity can evoke “us” and “them” problems.
As famed biologist Edward O. Wilson put it, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
When group performance was objective — like financial performance or tasks with correct answers — surface-level diversity had no effect on performance.
A common misconception is that “bad chemistry” is a clash of diverse personalities and work styles. But research doesn’t support any one approach to composing teams based on personality or work style.
Organizational scientists Anita Woolley, Christoph Riedl, and Thomas Malone led a research team that surprisingly found that the average level or maximum level of intelligence doesn’t do much to predict group effectiveness.
Of all these traits, only one emerged as a predictor of group effectiveness: social sensitivity. Social sensitivity is the ability to detect others’ emotions through nonverbal cues. Social sensitivity doesn’t have much to do with individual intelligence. But it is the key to collective intelligence — a group’s ability to perform effectively across a variety of tasks. Socially sensitive people can adjust their own behavior to accommodate their fellow group members’ feelings.
The bigger the team gets, the harder coordination gets. So how big is too big, and how small is too small?
On average, groups with three to seven members perform best (although it of course depends on the task).
A group of two only needs to manage one relationship. A group of five, however, needs to cope with ten dyadic relationships. A group of ten needs to manage forty-five. There’s nothing worse than a meeting with twenty people trying to have a meaningful discussion and make a decision.
Fred Brooks coined his famous Brooks’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
I hope it’s not too surprising that clear, important goals are essential to launching an effective collaboration.
But the reason that goal setting is taught everywhere is because it is so often done poorly. And that’s because there’s a hidden tension between clarity and importance. The most important goals are abstract.
A vivid shared picture of the future helps us manage the tension between clarity and importance.
Collective goals need one final ingredient: They need to be challenging. But that challenge needs to come with specificity.
Organizational psychologists Ed Locke and Gary Latham discovered the depth of this principle.
Research has shown that, as long as a person feels the numeric goal is possible to achieve (even if it is extremely difficult), a specific, challenging number helps them outperform “do your best” goals.
Challenging numeric goals motivate us by tapping into our need to feel competent, like we are masters of our environment.
All groups have both task and relational goals. It’s just a question of their relative importance.
Work groups and teams prioritize tasks over relationships but still need to foster relationships and not be so horrible that everyone quits.
Three critical conditions that promote effective groups: tasks, composition, and goals.
Group structure shapes group process. Well-composed real teams have an easier time coordinating. Because groups are aligning their efforts effectively, they often improve upon their initial goals and tasks, further improving their process. It’s no wonder they’re more effective.
- Thought 1: Clarify Boundaries to Foster Real Teams
- Problem: A lot of the main problems in teamwork come from understanding the boundaries of the team.
- Solution: How do you avoid confusion about who is in a group? Tell people! Over and over.
- Thought 2: Make Goals Explicit
- Problem: A group in which members have different — but unstated — ideas about the group’s purpose is doomed to dysfunction.
- Solution: Groups always have multiple purposes; the question is how to balance them.
- Thought 3: When You Make Decisions, Write Them Down
- Problem: Even though we talked about our goals and how to cooperate, our group doesn’t stick to them.
- Solution: When you discuss your goals and processes, write down what you agree on!
- Thought 4: Negotiate Your Roles, Tasks, and Jobs
- Problem: In a group we adopt roles. And those roles come with expectations for how we’ll behave.
- Solution: In a real team, everyone’s role is negotiated. Experts like Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski call this “job crafting”.
Conformity
Our tendencies toward conformity are embedded in our Paleolithic brains, which keep groups together and coordinating smoothly.
“Social influence” — the ways that other people alter your thoughts and behavior .
Go Along to Get Along | The Influence of the Many on the Few
Becoming a member of a group that is devoted to a cause changes your perspective on what counts as normal.
Social influence is a necessary part of group life. We get information from observing others’ behavior.
We have a radar for the unwritten rules of social life that silently help a group stay together — social norms.
Social norms are the rules that govern how one behaves in a particular group. When norms get passed down through generations, we call them traditions or rituals. At work, they might get formalized as policies or procedures. Norms are powerful, invisible influences on our behavior.
Kenneth Bettenhausen and J . Keith Murnighan put it, “Social norms are among the least visible and most powerful forms of social control over human action.”
“Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people.”
In 1935, legendary Turkish American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif (born Muzaffer Şerif Başoğlu) capitalized on the autokinetic effect to delve into the origins of social norms — and maybe even truth itself. Sherif realized that being a member of a group changed how people saw reality.
Groups are a lens through which members view what is true.
Many people adopt group norms so quickly, they don’t even realize they changed their own views. In a group with no norms, we’re all looking for information about what is appropriate. With clear norms and a shared reality, communication gets easier and the chances of synergy go up.
That’s why norms are the fourth condition for promoting group effectiveness.
“Path-dependence.” Over time, other technologies, platforms, and users learn and make things that depend on the status quo.
Like keyboard layouts and greeting rituals, most norms aren’t good or bad. But they are comforting in their familiarity.
Because norms are usually comforting and useful, many people shield them from change.
When most people follow norms, it is tough for any one individual to change them.
Inertia keeps norms, rituals, and processes in place.
At their worst, norms promote obedience without any benefit.
You Will Be Assimilated | The Dark Side of Conformity Pressures
Ants have colonized almost every corner of the earth. They’re the most numerous insects on the planet (scientists estimate there are twenty quadrillion of them) and collectively weigh about twelve megatons — more than all wild birds and mammals combined!
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work comparing ant sociality with our own.
The commonalities between humans and ants, Wilson argued, explain why the two species have outcompeted all others and become what he called “superorganisms.”
We have an innate need for autonomy and individuality. The problem with superorganisms is that they resolve almost any conflict between individual and collective needs in favor of the collective.
When we’re unsure (or don’t care very much), we like to blend in with the crowd.
Internally, the desire to belong makes us want to conform, to find commonality with those we identify with, so we copy them, often unconsciously.
Psychologist Irving Janis. His book Groupthink popularized the term, explaining how conformity pressures allow seemingly smart, capable groups of people to make spectacularly bad decisions.
Subtle norms toward agreement help us build rapport and shared identity — we look for common ground in most conversations.
We better remember information consistent with our preferences. That’s what social psychologists call “confirmation bias.”
“Biased information processing,” a phenomenon that compounds social influence pressures toward conformity. Through biased information processing, groups act as filters for information.
This is the dark side of social influence. Conformity pressures us to repress our unique knowledge and perspectives, unconsciously prioritizing harmony and belonging over the task. Conformity pressures are crystallized into formal, repeatable group processes through socialization, in which norms are taught to new group members. We calcify norms and procedures into laws and institutions that are so decoupled from their original purpose that they aren’t in anyone’s interests. Policies and procedures become ends in themselves, rather than means to an end.
Another way groups enforce conformity is through formalizing their norms. Law is just a word for a nation’s formalized norms.
One of the biggest lessons from social psychology in the last fifty years is: Bad is stronger than good in the brain.
Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem is best remembered for its poetic subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil. That phrase, “the banality of evil,” captures the danger of conformity pressure.
Red and Blue | How Groups Get Polarized
Researchers have found that polarization is increasing in the Western world.
Decades of research have shown that, despite their penchant for conformity, groups rarely regress toward the mean.
When a group leans a certain direction, interacting with one another pushes them even farther in that direction.
For the most part, “persuasive argument theory” — that polarization is mostly about people being logically convinced by the information available to them — isn’t so terrible for humanity.
All groups — from cults to political parties to boards of directors — have a tendency toward polarization. The catalyst is homophily — the human tendency to flock toward our in-group.
According to Harvard social psychologist Amit Goldenberg, there’s another force that explains polarization besides homophily, which he calls “acrophily.” Acrophily is a love of the extreme. Unfortunately, we like to listen to people with slightly more extreme versions of our own views.
We now get to the ultimate irony of polarization. Because extreme views gain influence, group members develop a warped sense of what is “normal” in the group.
Collectively, outrage about out-groups is a surefire way to get attention and approval from your own group.
In groups where everyone leans a certain way, you get ahead by being a bit more extreme than the average person. This leads to a race to the poles within a group.
There are always a few extremists in a group who dehumanize out-groups. Letting their views go unchecked is dangerous. It leads to these views getting traction on both sides.
The Idea Meritocracy | Winning the Battle Against the Dark Side of Conformity
Avoiding the dark side of conformity, like groupthink and polarization, is an ongoing battle against our Paleolithic brain that’s seeking safety within the herd.
Devil’s advocacy is an imperfect weapon because it contains part of the problem: advocacy. Advocacy is usually a step in the wrong direction, especially early in a group discussion. The alternative is to approach group discussions as shared problem-solving.
Scientists may have hypotheses, but they collect evidence to test them and update their views as new evidence comes in.
Research by London Business School professor Randall Peterson shows that groups make better decisions when leaders direct “how,” not “what.” Effective group leaders orchestrate the process of decision-making. They require groups to seek out all the information before trying to make sense of it. The best leaders also avoid advocating for specific options.
Leaders can and should direct information-sharing and decision-making processes.
MIT professor Deborah Ancona. Groups that look outward adapt faster to an ever-changing world. “Boundary-spanning” groups, as Ancona called them, can have a lot of advantages if they play their cards right.
That positions many boundary-spanning group members as “brokers” who connect two parties that aren’t otherwise connected. Brokers offer what organizational sociologist Ronald Burt calls a “vision advantage”: They have access to the rare combination of different groups’ shared realities.
Even if you don’t have the power to assemble your own team of rivals, you can still do your part in fighting off conformity and polarization. First, you can think like a broker. Second, you can go out and join new kinds of groups.
The foundation of avoiding conformity’s dark side is what Edmondson calls psychological safety — the shared sense that members can admit mistakes, suggest new ideas, and ask questions without fear.
Along with the four elements of structure, psychological safety is the fifth essential condition for truly effective collectives. Psychological safety isn’t an individual feeling. The same person can behave wildly differently in two different groups. Psychological safety allows groups to develop norms and behaviors that keep conformity pressures at bay. Psychological safety is fragile because we’re so sensitive to ostracism. Our Paleolithic brain fears that ridicule is a precursor to being kicked out of the group. Psychological safety is most important when we’re trying something new — when we need to learn and be creative.
Albert Hirschman. Hirschman posited that when members of a group see a problem, they have two options: They can either speak up (voice), or they can leave the group (exit).
We all face similar decisions on a smaller scale. No group is perfect, and there are always things that need changing.
Real listening means the speaker feels understood in meaning and intent.
Another way to fight conformity is for your group to interact less — or rather, more strategically. And the way we can do that is by aggregating members’ information, preferences, and opinions without interacting.
One area that benefits from the wisdom of crowds is predictions.
Crowds outperform individuals and interacting groups when judgments are independent, but they fall victim to social influence once they see the judgments of others.
The problem is that, once we see other people’s judgments, the crowds get less wise and turn to madness just as often as wisdom. Crowds become mobs. Economists refer to this as “herding”.
That’s why information systems and the process by which individual judgments are collected, stored, and aggregated are so important.
If you’re in the minority trying to influence a majority, you have two options for expressing your position. One is to be a loyal member of the group in all other respects so you earn what social psychologist Edwin Hollander calls “idiosyncrasy credits.” Loyal group members get an occasional pass to deviate from a few norms or disagree with the majority. The other approach is to openly challenge the status quo or majority — and to do so respectfully but consistently. Over time, the group accepts that you’re that person who thinks that thing no one else does. The secret to becoming a tolerated deviant is to be consistent in your position over time. And it is hard to influence the majority without a friend.
When groups are stressed — by time pressure, competition, or threat — tolerance for dissent goes down.
Being accepted within the herd was a matter of life and death for our ancestors, but we can handle a bit more disagreement now.
Social psychologist Charlan Nemeth found that groups that make good use of dissent are more creative and do better in complex decisions — even when the dissenter is wrong. Hearing another point of view breaks conformity’s spell — the illusion that no one thinks differently is shattered.
Fostering psychological safety and productive dissent, while maintaining the bonds that hold us together, is crucial. And very, very difficult.
- Thought 1: Check on Your Norms and Shared Reality at Beginnings, Middles, and Ends of Tasks
- Problem: Conformity pressures make it difficult to establish healthy norms.
- Solution: Have explicit discussions about the alignment between your groups’ values, goals, and norms at regular intervals.
- Thought 2: Approach Group Decisions Like You Are Solving a Problem Together, Searching for Unique Information and Perspectives
- Problem: Group discussions are biased against unique information and minority perspectives.
- Solution: Group decisions should be us versus the problem.
- Thought 3: Keep Communication Channels Open and Information Storage Obvious
- Problem: Most groups don’t have Bridgewater Associates’ Dot Collector. At best, they have a messy shared drive, where it isn’t clear which documents are up-to-date or whether they are all there.
- Solution: I can’t even tell you how many problems in new groups could be avoided with a discussion of communication and information storage norms.
- Thought 4: Build a Culture of Psychological Safety
- Problem: Psychological safety is fragile.
- Solution: Honestly, you should probably read Amy Edmondson’s voluminous work on this subject.
- Thought 5: Keep Your Boundaries Semi-Porous
- Problem: Groups need clearly defined boundaries.
- Solution: As discussed earlier, use newcomers as an opportunity for learning.
- Thought 6: To Avoid Echo Chambers, Keep Your Information Diet Healthy and Balanced
- Problem: We love to consume out-group outrage — to give our attention to people talking about all the ways our group is victimized and other groups are to blame.
- Solution: Bestselling food science author Michael Pollan’s simple dietary advice is to eat a variety of unprocessed foods — mostly plants. Your information diet should be similar.
Competition
Competition is a powerful motivator, but you need to know when it helps and when it hurts performance.
Always Competing | How Competition Shapes Us and Our Groups
Competition with a rival helps group performance.
Competition has some sneakily cooperative properties, too. Its Latin root, competere, means “to meet” or “strive in common.” In competitive situations, we can, quite literally, bring out the best in one another. Although competition can sometimes bring out the best in you, its overall track record in improving human performance is mixed. Competition also brings out the worst in us. We hoard resources and information, making it harder to cooperate. Too often, competition can spill over into conflict that, between groups, is the most dangerous force humanity has to offer. Competition is stressful. And stress can be good or bad for performance.
Psychologist Robert Zajonc. In his research, Zajonc showed that the key to understanding how pressure affects people is their mastery of the task at hand. Zajonc was terrible at naming things, calling the positive effect “social facilitation” and the negative effect “social inhibition.”
In sum, competition has a complicated relationship with human performance.
To understand social comparison and status, you have to understand groups. We usually don’t compare ourselves to random strangers. Instead, we selectively compare ourselves to fellow group members, real or imagined — someone we share, or aspire to share, an identity with.
Social psychologist Susan Fiske summarizes our social comparison tendencies as “envy up, scorn down.”
Humans aren’t unique as voracious status seekers. Many animals have clear status hierarchies that help organize their social lives, from alpha wolves to queen bees.
Because of our ability to quickly detect status cues, we’ll spontaneously produce hierarchy in a group without it.
We need some hierarchy for coordination and collaboration. Social hierarchy can help peacefully settle arguments between members. It can also speed up decisions as we all look to our superiors to guide us. But in most groups, we end up with more hierarchy than we need.
Humans are happy within a hierarchy only when they stay put or move up.
Flexible hierarchies have their own problems. As we discussed with norms and roles, groups need some predictability to coordinate effectively.
Hierarchy does two other bad things to groups. First, being at the top of the hierarchy changes people. A lot of things make us feel more distant from other people. But some important ones are power and status. If you’re lower in the status hierarchy, you also may find yourself eager to please and obey those higher up.
The Escalator to Hell | The Conflict Within “Us” and Between “Us” and “Them”
Competition for status in groups is natural, but it’s also fraught with danger.
The Socratic method we know today constantly challenges ideas to probe their underlying assumptions and seek their truth.
The nature of conflict mirrors the ancient debate between Socrates and the Sophists. Conflict is the behavioral manifestation of disagreement or dislike.
Task conflict is any action that indicates disagreement. When members of a group express different preferences or ideas, that’s task conflict. Within groups, task conflict should help the group make better decisions and be more creative, as well as offer individuals the chance to learn from one another. In theory, at least.
Unfortunately, within-group conflict doesn’t always stay focused on the task. Relationship conflict isn’t just disagreement about ideas — it’s visible dislike. Relationship conflict takes time and energy away from other goals.
When conflict turns personal, the group is in real trouble.
Conflict between groups has an unfortunate tendency to escalate. It’s self-reinforcing, intensifying through a series of feedback loops.
I think of intergroup conflict like a forest fire that creates flammable ashes. Even after the fire is out, it’s just a bunch of dry kindling waiting for another spark.
There are two main ways in which conflict is sustained, especially between groups.
The first is rooted in our psychological tendency not only to keep doing what we’ve always done, but also to escalate commitment even to a failing course of action. Escalating commitment to a failing course of action is such a well-known phenomenon now, it seems almost mundane. It starts with our tendency to stick with things because we’ve already invested time, effort, and money, even when it ends up costing us more in the future. This is known as the “sunk-cost fallacy.”
But escalation of commitment isn’t just the sunk-cost fallacy by another name. It is also caused by overconfidence. Overconfidence also extends to our choice of leaders. Groups flock to those who promise they will prevail. These overconfident, extreme leaders are unlikely to de-escalate conflict or abandon failing courses of action.
Everyone should be allowed to learn, grow, and change. Yesterday’s opinion might not match today’s decision — because today is different.
Groups have a bias toward the status quo.
Conflicts between groups continue because that’s the status quo.
And that’s without even factoring in the second half of the intergroup conflict problem: Humans love an unhealthy dish that’s best served cold.
Revenge is everywhere. And it isn’t unique to humans. Revenge is one of those paradoxical groupy behaviors. It is costly for the individual dishing it out because it risks retaliation from its target. Human revenge is as influenced by culture and norms as it is by evolution and genetics.
According to UNC psychologist Joshua Jackson and his colleagues, people are most likely to take revenge when they perceive four qualities in a transgression: It’s intentional, aggressive, severe, and morally offensive.
Moreover, in-group/out-group bias means that the in-group’s well-being is “worth more” than the out-group’s. Harm to one of us is worth harm to two of them.
When we look at out-groups, we exaggerate their homogeneity.
Groups that have been in conflict for a long time don’t even need a trigger for revenge-like behavior.
Of Pigs and Potatoes | What We Can Do About Competition and Conflict
According to sociologist Randall Collins, the reasons groups in conflict de-escalate are nuanced and based on context. One reason is that they can’t find solidarity within their own group — some people want to keep fighting, but others aren’t so sure.
Another factor is that, like in the dollar auction, groups learn from experience to fear escalating conflict (although they forget again pretty quickly). Even the distorting lenses of in-group favoritism and out-group denigration don’t lead them to see a positive outcome for their group.
We have decades of research showing that even friends of friends from other groups can change people’s attitudes, making them more favorably disposed toward the outgroup. For a little while, at least. But intergroup contact isn’t enough, on its own, to change behavior.
Superordinate goals should reduce intergroup conflict by focusing both groups on the big picture. Superordinate goals are an important tool in reducing intergroup conflict. Superordinate goals that focus groups in conflict on their commonalities are extremely powerful.
But even superordinate goals, on their own, aren’t enough to end intergroup conflict. These goals need to translate into lasting collaboration and interdependence, where the stakes of conflict are so high that the majority has a lot to lose if conflict escalates.
Some now call this kind of situation “coopetition,” a portmanteau of cooperation and competition.
Solidarity with other groups tends to wear off after a few months if strong cooperation structures aren’t built.
They’re the ones who try to keep groups apart and encourage prejudice and conflict. Those who look to blame any problem on the other group and stoke anger. Those who demonize and dehumanize others. Those are the common foes we all face today — the politicians, bullies, and small-minded who prey on the dark side of our Paleolithic brains.
- Thought 1: Compete Against Your Past Self
- Problem: Although competition is motivating, it often directs our attention to others.
- Solution: Competing against yourself is the safest way to harness competition’s benefits while minimizing its risks.
- Thought 2: Keep Conflict Focused on the Task
- Problem: Disagreement about ideas is good in theory but hard to keep under control.
- Solution: Start with everything we’ve said about good group decision-making in prior chapters: psychological safety, process leadership, clear goals, and productive dissent.
- Thought 3: Work on Your Integrative Negotiation Skills
- Problem: When people have different preferences or interests, their best solution isn’t usually fighting it out. It’s to negotiate!
- Solution: When you have a fixed-pie mindset, it is easy to overlook win-win solutions. Skilled negotiators look for opportunities for mutual gains. They negotiate multiple issues simultaneously, and they share information and discuss preferences rather than making offers or demands. All negotiations are collective decisions. The same basic rules apply.
- Thought 4: Get a Mediator to Help Diffuse Dysfunctional Conflict
- Problem: One of the most common questions I get is: How do I deal with two teammates who can never seem to get along?
- Solution: A starting point is to have a skilled third party get involved — a mediator.
Leading Groups
The House Always Wins | When to Structure and When to Coach Your Groups
Organizational psychologist Ruth Wageman. In her research, Wageman investigated two broad classes of leader behaviors: structuring and coaching. First, leaders could intervene by structuring the group — they could work on the goals, tasks, composition, and norms of the team. Second, they could intervene by coaching the group — trying to manage conflict productively, facilitating problem-solving sessions, and offering advice.
Structure is king. You need the right structure in place for good coaching to make a difference.
Of how your group is structured. Do you have a small team with diverse, task-relevant knowledge and perspectives? Is your goal clear, challenging, important, and vivid? Is the work well designed? Are your norms aligned with your purpose? Work on fixing structural problems before you focus on fixing process.
The most common mistake managers, parents, or other group leaders make is to coach without considering the group’s structure.
Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman use what they call the 60:30:10 rule to think about what matters most for group effectiveness. The rule states that about 60 percent of group effectiveness is determined by structural features like goals, tasks, composition, and norms. About 30 percent of effectiveness is determined by how the team is launched. Are the group’s goals and purpose articulated clearly? And the final 10 percent is determined by expert coaching — small adjustments, advice, and problem-solving that keep the team on track.
The individualistic “Great Man” theories of leadership that permeate our society and institutions. Like the “Lone Genius,” the “Great Man” takes too much credit for a group’s success — but instead of claiming sole responsibility, the “Great Man” claims to be uniquely able to pull greatness from others.
When people stop to think about it, they’re smart enough to realize that any single leader isn’t able to solve every group problem.
The L Word | When and Why Leadership Matters
So why do we still expect our leaders to be heroes? When a group is struggling, it’s clear that many people think replacing the leader is a good move. On average, the data doesn’t support leader change as a reliable method for rejuvenating groups.
Coaches are most influential when they control composition — they can change who’s on the team and who plays.
You should think about leadership as what all group members are doing to improve group dynamics. In other words, you should think about group leadership as “functional” and “shared.” By functional, I mean getting the most essential group functions fulfilled, whatever they are at the moment.
Group leadership is shared — no one person or job title should be responsible for providing all the group’s leadership.
You only need leadership changes when formal leaders abdicate their duties — when they’re unwilling or unable to make necessary changes to group structure and processes.
If you find yourself in a leadership position, is it better to be humble, authentic, and generous? Yes! But even if you aren’t, the important thing is to do what needs doing. Clarify goals. Do your part to improve psychological safety. If you don’t understand or agree with the norms, discuss them.
Be proactive — don’t wait around for other people to tell you what to do. Communicate clearly. And if you can’t do something you think needs doing, help find someone who can. That’s real group leadership.
Groups of the Future | Or Our Future with Groups
Most problems in virtual teams are the same problems you have in other teams. Still, virtual teams do differ from face-to-face groups. Importantly, they increase psychological distance among members.
Virtual collaboration actually has a lot of advantages, even though it increases psychological distance and information loss.
The main tip I give to virtual teams is to establish communication norms and stick to them. When you keep mixing different communication processes, it’s harder to develop productive norms. Yet if you have good group dynamics, new technologies can enable better, more diverse collaboration than ever before.
The principles that Edmondson discovered from this and many other studies can help any group or organization trying to embrace innovation.
- The first, of course, was to set an environment of psychological safety, where speaking up and trial and error are not only tolerated but encouraged.
- Second, you need to acknowledge that your goal isn’t just about the technology — it’s also about the team.
- And third, compose your learning team carefully.
Each technology gives us something new and crowds out something old that others valued.
For leaders who rose to power in the old world, the prospect of a new world seems both threatening and unbelievable.
How new technologies affect humanity depends on learning in groups.
David A. Kolb’s famous model of learning goes something like this: You have an experience, like trying a new technology for the first time. You then reflect on how that experience went.
You then seek to theorize, looking for generalizable principles from your reflection, and you try to put those into practice by experimenting with your behavior. Which then leads to another experience.
That’s the mantra for improving group dynamics.
I really believe that groups are the solution, not the problem. In my ideal future, all groups embrace learning, constantly seeking new and better ways of working together. Members learn from one another, and the world gets a little more groupy.
For good and ill, groups often persist beyond their founders’ participation. They become something more than the sum of their members and don’t depend on any one of them — even a leader who claims to be divine.
Today’s groups are tomorrow’s institutions.
For a group to persist beyond its current membership, it needs to make things more formal.
All groups have some characteristics of organizations. The question is how formal they are.
The most important thing for you to understand is that formalizing a group into an organization is a trade-off. Some steps formalize a group’s existence, making it seem more legitimate to outsiders. Other kinds of formalization allow coordination and goal accomplishment to continue, even when membership changes.
The dark side of formalization is that it makes change more difficult. Many of today’s organizations are smart enough to adapt. And these old organizations contain the vestiges of the “medieval institutions.” Regardless of their downsides, organizations are one of the only ways for our groups to outlive us.
As anthropologist Margaret Mead supposedly said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
There are four main themes I hope you walk away from this book with:
- Take a collective perspective.
- Structure is king.
- Leadership isn’t just for leaders.
- The secret to groups is learning together.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, novelist William Faulkner said: “The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself … only that is worth writing about.”
Collective life is a balancing act, a Faulknerian dilemma of “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
