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Why Picking the Best and the Brightest Doesn’t Always Lead to Team Success
Copyright 2006, The Learning Business, LLC

My interest in team dynamics started in the military where I cut my teeth as a leader for a number of different groups and teams. Some time later, I had the opportunity to set up and chair a non-profit community organization, which included a number of subcommittees reporting to a board of directors. I leveraged my need to understand more about team dynamics by writing a major paper on the subject for the MBA I was taking at the time. Over the ensuing years, I was fortunate to serve in leadership positions on community, business, educational, professional, public, and governmental committees. I never fail to be intrigued by the dynamics of the various groups and organizations, formal and informal, that I get involved with in my personal, educational, and business life.

Since late 1999, a couple of years before I set up my own consulting business in corporate training and development, I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate business classes for working adults at a major national university. This university requires students to work together in teams to research, write, and present a project for each class they take, generally for 30% of their course grade.

In my classes, I allow students to select whom they want to work with as teammates during the first night. The students usually start a program together and move with each other in a cohort from course to course. Generally, the students know each other and have stabilized their core team membership as they progressed through previous courses. My only restriction is that team size be limited to from three to five members. This is because a member dropping from a two-member team leaves the other stranded. I have found that teams of six or more tend to become less productive because of social loafing: a phenomenon where each individual depends more and more on others to do team work as team size increases.

I also keep an arm’s length distance from team decision-making and conflict resolution, for two main reasons. First, as a business survival skill, the students must learn how to work together. They will not learn how to do that if the instructor is a crutch for them. Second, the more the instructor makes decisions for the team, the less buy-in the students have for the project. This creates the opportunity to shift responsibility—rather than accept it—for project outcomes.

Since 1999, I have kept grading records for student individual and group work for over 400 students organized into 95 teams across 35 courses. Over that time, I began noticing that students tended to select each other to work on a team based on similar past academic performance. Since I had historical grade performance and have always been intrigued by team dynamics, I decided to put my observation to the test.

I created a database of records that contained, for each course and team, the score for the team project and the average combined score for the individual work of team members. Then I sorted and graphed, by course, the average of the individual work scores for each team. I threw out records where the weight for the group grade was not 30%, where it was the first course the students were taking, where there was only one team, and where I had a particularly dysfunctional group. I was not surprised to confirm my observation that the students did arrange themselves into groups by individual academic performance. The differences were easy to see in both graduate and undergraduate courses. Since team members tended to reselect each other from course to course, they also represented individuals with a comfortable group dynamic and similar performance expectations.

Because the data indicated that students grouped themselves by their member’s academic performance, I wanted to see how this influenced their team scores. One might assume that there was a direct correlation. This did not prove to be the case. When I compared the average of individual scores to their team scores, without regard to course, I discovered that the team scores decreased slightly as the individual averages increased. In short, the team scores were not sensitive to the level of academic performance of the individuals making up the team.

I then decided to look at team performance on a course-by-course basis. I first compared the team with the highest individual average to the one with the lowest. The team with the highest individual average score outperformed the one with the lowest just slightly more than half of the time. I then compared the middle teams to the lowest team. These middle teams outperformed the lowest less than 40% of the time.

Essentially, what I found was that individual academic achievement as a predictor of team performance was not a sure thing. In some cases it was, and in others it led to opposite results. This reminded me of the Apollo Syndrome as reported by R. Meredith Belbin (Management & Leadership in Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, Henemann, 1981). In team performance experiments at Henley’s Management College, teams competed against a “best team” comprised of sharp, analytical, high mental ability individuals. In most cases, the “best team” placed poorly in the competitions. This occurred because the individuals on the team were self-centered and highly competitive, spending much of their time in trying to convince the others that they had the right approach. The team spent much of its time in debate and it generally rushed its decisions.

Belbin concluded that it was the mix of the individuals on a team and their willingness to support each other in a cooperative environment that was a predictor of success. In the case of the “best team,” the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Livingston, in an article in Harvard Business Review, noted that academic performance was not a sure predictor of success in careers that involved leading and working with people (Myth of the well-educated manager, January-February 1971).

What can we learn from this? First, there is more to successful team performance than putting individual high flyers on a team. The very personal factors that make an individual successful may be detrimental to team performance. The more successful Apollo teams had an absence of highly dominant members, a good blend of skills pertinent to the team task, a mix of task- and socially-oriented members, and a shared leadership for the various roles.

Second, high individual performers may elect to team with other high individual performers because they have a comfortable group dynamic. This may improve their team performance but is not a guarantee of success. Teams composed of lower individual performers can often be more successful.

Selecting team members for a high-performing team involves many factors. These include the task, member skill and experience diversity related to the task, member motivation, a mix of task and social orientations, team size, time to complete, resource availability, team leadership, and management support. Successful teams are the ones constructed that account for these factors to create a combined performance that is far greater than the performance of the individuals who make them up.

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