After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.
1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.
My guess is that teams which have members with high sensitivity didn't do well, either. If you're afraid of speaking up because someone will get upset at you, you're only a superficial member of the team.
Both of these criteria amount to different facets of the same thing: teams have to work together as a team. That sounds stupid, but practical criteria as given above help to define that simple statement.
I agree. That is probably the wrong term for the phenomenon. There are elements of forthrightness and trust that aren't captured by the word 'sensitivity'. On top of that 'sensitivity' carries negative connotations to many.
I think this is what's called Power Distance Index (PDI) in Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. It's a fairly well established set of sociability measurements that's been around since the 1970s and is quite well established. Interestingly it also emerged from another (perhaps the original) large multicultural global technology organisation: IBM
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Here is a high-level summary...
After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.
1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.
My guess is that teams which have members with high sensitivity didn't do well, either. If you're afraid of speaking up because someone will get upset at you, you're only a superficial member of the team.
Both of these criteria amount to different facets of the same thing: teams have to work together as a team. That sounds stupid, but practical criteria as given above help to define that simple statement.
I agree. That is probably the wrong term for the phenomenon. There are elements of forthrightness and trust that aren't captured by the word 'sensitivity'. On top of that 'sensitivity' carries negative connotations to many.
I think this is what's called Power Distance Index (PDI) in Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. It's a fairly well established set of sociability measurements that's been around since the 1970s and is quite well established. Interestingly it also emerged from another (perhaps the original) large multicultural global technology organisation: IBM