How to Get Your Team to Pull Together

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- All those team-building exercises aren’t enough, it turns out. Getting members of a team to pull in the same direction is harder than most managers think, according to research by Vijaya Venkataramani, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, and coauthor Matthew J. Pearsall at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina.

At least as important as team solidarity, the study shows, is “team-learning orientation” — a kind of emotional intelligence. The little-recognized problem the two authors explore is that even on a tightly bonded team with broadly shared goals, each person has a slightly different agenda. Some people are aware of this issue but others remain oblivious. “Many people simply assume they are all working toward the same goal,” Venkataramani says, even when that’s far from the case.

It’s not that individual team members join a project for their own glory (though that could be a problem) or even that people’s goals are totally contradictory. The issue could be as simple as one person being keen on the strategic implications of the project while another is more interested in hands-on implementation. In other words, one person might think like a marketer, while another thinks like an engineer. An overlooked part of teamwork, therefore, involves talking openly about different goals, and coordinating.

“There's not much research on asymmetrical goals on teams,” Venkataramani says. “In the little that has been done, the only prescription they offer to improve performance is to increase team members’ identification with one another. But we find that's not enough.”

To test their theory that team-learning orientation is also crucial, Venkataramani and Pearsall divided 280 students in a business school course into 56 teams of 5 people each. The learning orientation of each group was measured through a test that asked them how much they agreed with statements like, “My team looks for opportunities to develop new skills and knowledge.” Other scholars have shown that the test is a good measure of team-learning aptitude.

Venkataramani and Pearsall subjected some of the teams, but not others, to solidarity-strengthening exercises: They picked a name for themselves, designed a banner, and built paper airplanes.

All teams then took part in a web-based project involving climbing Mount Everest. Each member of the team was assigned a persona: A “photographer” got points for staying an extra day or two at one camp to take photos, for example, while the “leader” got a point if everyone made it to the top. Individual goals remained secret unless someone volunteered them.

Over several rounds, players got information about their health, the weather, and other relevant factors, and voted on whether to move on or stay put. For maximum performance, compromise and coordination was necessary.

The teams’ total scores were compared, and the scholars also noted when players made compromises for the good of a team or coordinated in other ways. Teams with a team-learning orientation were better at sharing information, and individual members were better at weighing their own goals against the common good. After the game, members of these teams were better able to identify the goals of their teammates.

A good team-learning orientation helped players develop a better mental model of how teams work.

The study doesn’t say that the rah-rah team-building exercises that pervade the modern workplace are pointless — or that team-learning skills can replace them. “Without one, the other doesn’t work,” Venkataramani says.

There are things managers and employees can do to take advantage of these insights. Managers can seed teams with people who they know score highly on team-learning skills. Alternatively (or additionally), team members might be prompted to talk openly, at the start of a project, about their hopes and goals.

That simple step would bring to light just how differently everyone sees things, even on the closest-knit teams, alerting members to the issue of “asymmetric goals.”

Read more: “Overcoming Asymmetric Goals in Teams: The Interactive Roles of Team Learning Orientation and Team Identification,” by Matthew J. Pearsall and Vijaya Venkataramani, is in press at the Journal of Applied Psychology.