What drives successful workplace teams?

Teamwork, the saying goes, makes the dream work. That’s especially true at Carolina, a campus known for its collaborative culture.

But what makes a team work?

The Well asked a pair of Carolina experts about successful collaboration for a new series that will showcase employees who function well together to achieve the University’s mission of top-tier education, research and public service.

The experts are longtime collaborators in the Kenan-Flagler Business School: Matthew Pearsall, associate professor of organizational behavior, and Jessica Siegel Christian, clinical associate professor of organizational behavior. They research subjects like team performance, team adaptation and team resilience.

“There’s this assumption in the literature and in the popular press that teams will automatically work well — that we fully understand our interdependence, how to work together, what everybody does,” Pearsall said. “And it’s just not true.”

Teamwork isn’t easy, especially these days. The workplace is more diverse and dispersed than ever, and teams face fast-paced change, whether it’s driven by technological advances, economic factors or even a global pandemic.

Nevertheless, teamwork is necessary. “Groups have the potential for more high-level decision-making, better quality decisions and more productivity,” Pearsall said. “And you need them for challenging, complex tasks. So, when we think about the team, what do you need to have in place to enable you to do effective things?”

Pearsall and Christian point to four pillars that enable effective group collaboration on complex tasks: 1) Identification with the group and mission, 2) trust, 3) distributed expertise and 4) empowering or shared leadership.

Do you work on a team at Carolina that exhibits one or more of the following qualities? If so, drop us an email at thewell@unc.edu. We’re looking for examples to cover in future stories in this series.

Pillar 1: Identification with the group and mission

Teams work more cohesively when they believe in a shared goal. Carolina has a clear and worthy mission: As the nation’s first public university, it serves North Carolina, the United States and the world through teaching, research and public service. One way to connect the specific work of a team to the University’s broad mission is to build action steps around the objectives and initiatives of the University’s strategic plan, Carolina Next: Innovations for Public Good.

Just as important, Pearsall and Christian said, is belief in the team itself. Research shows that people are willing to work harder and sacrifice more when they value the people they work with and the relationships they’ve formed. Which brings us to trust.

Pillar 2: Trust

Members of a team must trust one another. For example, Christian said, without trust, “I’m not going to bring up tough issues or admit my mistakes. If I don’t trust that you’re doing your job, I’m going to slack off on my job.”

Trust has its own foundations — mutual respect, fair treatment, getting to know one another in a deep way. You need to understand how your fellow team members work, what motivates them, how to listen to them and how to give them feedback so they won’t get upset. A key question for teams: How do we work best so that we can help each other be successful?

A similar foundational concept is called psychological safety. “People talk about psychological safety as if it simply means being nice to each other,” Pearsall said. “But it specifically means feeling safe to admit to mistakes without being embarrassed and pilloried by everybody else so that the rest of the group can learn from them.” He cited evidence from members of nursing teams who shared mistakes so that others wouldn’t make the same error and, as a result, lives were saved.

How do team members instill psychological safety and trust? “There are team-building sessions and trust exercises,” Christian said. “But the best way to achieve trust is through a history of working together and positive interactions.” Over time, teams can develop a shared attitude towards things like learning — known as team-learning orientation — where a team looks at setbacks and mistakes as an opportunity.

Pillar 3: Distributed expertise

In today’s workplace, especially at a world-class institution like Carolina, “deep expertise is growing,” said Christian. We rely on each other’s knowledge and abilities more than ever.

“Teams comprising diverse expertise are forced, organically, into greater interaction between team members,” she and Pearsall wrote in a white paper on team structure and resilience. “When you have a diverse team of experts, they are forced to learn about what each other does and to interact and discuss more.”

“A team structure of distributed expertise forces team members to think through issues and challenges in greater depth,” they wrote. “There are new levels of discourse, and thus, inherently, more opportunities for the team to check each other, and notice problems coming
down the line.”

That can lead to deeper understanding and trust, higher performance and resilience.

Pillar 4: Empowering or shared leadership

Distributed expertise goes hand-in-hand with shared leadership. “Effective teams, where each member brings unique things to the table, are able to let someone step forward when they know more and then step back, let someone else take the lead,” Pearsall said. The idea of shared leadership, he said, stems in part from the rise of empowering leadership, which has been the focus of many organizations over the last 15 years or so. “It’s a recognition that leaders shouldn’t be micromanaging teams of experts who often know more than they do about the actual subject matter.”

For example, Pearsall said, imagine you’re managing a team of software engineers. You can’t keep up with their knowledge of code, so you charge your team to take the lead in figuring out a particular software solution. The team must self-manage throughout the process, including critiquing itself and managing interpersonal conflict.

Does your team work well together? Drop us a line at thewell@unc.edu.