×

Competency Coordinates: Accountable for Team

Easily assigning tasks and in a way that is clear and matches the level of competency of team members, ensuring that team members provide feedback, and present relevant arguments at the right time.

Unlock your team motivation

  • Motivation is the intensity (how hard a person tries), direction (how is the person’s effort channeled) and persistence (how long is the person’s effort maintained) towards attaining a goal. Managers and team leaders have all sorts of naive theories about motivation, namely, that motivation: is a signal of strength (and demotivation is sign of weakness); is something you either have or don’t have in you; is a matter of mastering your own mind; can be inspired by charismatic leaders. As appealing as they may sound, motivation has less to do with strength, nature, control and leadership that it has with a set of very specific conditions that can be thoughtfully and easily implemented within teams and organizations.

  • Current knowledge about motivation is vast, here we cover four main frameworks that are known to have a substantive influence on team and organization motivation: your beliefs about your colleagues; universal needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness; expectations about a task; and fairness.

  • Back in 1957, Douglas McGregor discussed how our beliefs about our colleagues can have a deleterious impact on motivation. Considering our colleague as someone that dislikes (versus likes) work, must be coerced, controlled and threatened (versus has self-control and self-direction), and avoids responsibility (versus seeks responsibility) is consistent with Theory X of management and the recipe for practices that are known to demotivate people. Examples are micromanaging, patronizing and blaming management styles (which stand in opposition with capacity building, trustful and accountable management styles).

  • Self Determination Theory revealed that people have three universal needs that promote motivation:
    • Autonomy. Being causal agents of one’s own life and acting in harmony with one’s integrated self. It is compromised by tangible rewards, threats, deadlines, directives, pressured evaluations, and imposed goals; it is improved by choice, acknowledgment of feelings, and opportunities for self-direction.
    • Competence. Controlling the outcomes and the experience of mastery. It is compromised by negative performance feedback and improved by optimal challenges, effectiveness in promoting feedback, and freedom from demeaning evaluations.
    • Relatedness. Interacting with, being connected to, and experiencing caring for others. It is compromised by cold and uncaring relations and failure to respond to task success, and improved by a secure relational base.

  • An early theory of motivation proposed by Victor Vroom states that motivation depends on what are the expectations with which people approach a task. People are more motivated when they expect that there is high probability of i) their action and effort leading to the desired performance (expectancy), ii) their performance leading to a fair reward (instrumentality), and iii) the fair reward being attractive and desired (valence). In brief, “Motivation = Expectancy X Instrumentality X Valence” and working on any of these elements of the chain can improve motivation.

  • You cannot motivate someone that is treated unfairly, at least not in the context of a healthy relationship. Unfairness not only withdraws people from their responsibilities, it is also associated with dysfunction, absenteeism, retaliation, theft and violence. But what is fairness made of in practice and how can it be improved? Three key elements of fairness that substantially improve motivation are: participation (the opportunity to express opinions about what should be done); trust (perceptions about the motives of those responsible for awarding rewards or punishments, namely, the concern for the needs of people and the orientation to do what is right); and interpersonal treatment (true, timely and appropriate information and mutual respect and sensitive treatment).

 Pitfalls for team dysfunction!

  • You know this story – a group becomes an angry and crazy mob in destruction mode. It may be soccer fans standing against a game result, the siege of the US capitol by Republicans standing against an election, or the manifestation of local communities standing against a new project development. They all share the ingredients that cook the narrative of “people gone crazy”, “unexplainable”, “unbelievable”. As condemnable as some of these behaviors are, they are explainable, predictable and rooted in the same conditions that promote team dysfunction. A common response to team dysfunction is explaining dysfunctional team behaviors the same way you explain a angry mob – with narratives that are simplified and disconnected from reality.

  • The next pitfall on the list is group-think. This is a well-known and extensively studied phenomena that describes a mode of thinking where people deeply involved with a group and striving for unanimity override their motivation to appraise alternative and more realistic courses of action. Group-think is the result of the nowadays popular group polarization and can be extraordinarily pervasive and underly many of the “crazy mob” episodes we remember. Three things to keep in mind regarding this phenomenon:
    • Why does group-think occur? Two core reasons: structural antecedents, like insulation, lack of tradition, norms or knowledge for critical and impartial reasoning, group ideological and social homogeneity; and situational antecedents, like external stressors, low self-esteem, and negative expectations.
    • What are the most common symptoms of group-think? Overestimation of the group (e.g., a strong belief in moral correctness), close-mindedness (e.g., rationalization of evidence) and pressure towards conformity (e.g., intolerance to diverse opinions).
    • What are the consequences of group-think? Omissions, systematic biases, failure to reconsider, poor balance between costs and benefits, and resistance to diversity, to name a few.

  • The last pitfall on the list is false consensus. Have you ever been in a situation where everyone agrees with a decision in public, but you know most of them would disagree in private? That is called the Abilene Paradox and is defined as the inability to manage agreement! Groups trapped in this paradox will privately acknowledged a problem and the steps needed to cope with it but will fail to accurately communicate their beliefs and make collective decisions that lead to actions contrary to what they want. The end result is frustration, anger, irritation, and dissatisfaction with the group.

Key tips to help you in managing your teams

1. Learn what beliefs you hold about your colleagues

Try the questions bellow, give a 0 if you disagree and a 1 if you agree. Any result equal or above 3 suggests you endorse to some extent Theory X beliefs.

  • Most employees can’t be trusted
  • Most employees will exercise little self-control
  • The role of managers is to exert control and motivate employees
  • If people where free to say, most would admit they don’t like to work
  • More often than not, employees lack ambition

2. Improve autonomy, competence and relatedness

Try asking your teams how autonomous, competent and supported they feel. Also ask for improvement ideas, for example, reducing the regularity of meetings, providing training opportunities, or giving regular feedback on the accomplishments and strengths of the team. Putting some of the (doable) recommendations into practice is likely to boost your team motivation!

3. Promote fairness

In theory, most people love the idea of a fair world. The trick is how can this be accomplished. Joel Brocker describes 6 factors that make it so difficult to be fair: status differences, conflict avoidance, uncertainty, ignorance, resources and under-confidence. Learn from Brocker in his HBR paper “Why It’s So Hard to Be Fair” here.

4. Reduce group-think

Paying attention to and reducing the prevalence of the antecedents and symptoms of group-think are a great way reduce this phenomenon. A few rules of thumb are: reduce team size; avoid insulation from outside; provide teams with face-saving mechanisms in case of failure; discuss risks separately from gains; ensure open-leader behaviour; encourage diversity of views; appoint a “devil’s advocate”; protect and record alternative points of view; and extend problem-solving phase and delay solutions. In case you have not seen group-think in action, consider listening to and identifying the symptoms in The Daily podcast titled “How they stormed Congress” depicting the attack to the US capitol on the 6th January 2021 here.

5. Reduce false consensus

In his seminal paper, Jerry B. Harvey, provided a diagnostic questionnaire to the Abilene Paradox. In brief, widespread unsolvable conflict in the organization, hidden discourses about lack of leadership, and existence of individuals or small groups that might have private positions and discourses that are different from the public one suggests that you are trapped inside the paradox. How can you move away from this trap? Confront the false consensus in team meetings, conduct a private voting, minimize status differences, and structure discussion to allow for opposing views.

References
  • McGregor, D. M. (1964). The human side of enterprise. In H. J. Leavitt, L. R. Pondy, & D. M. Boje (Eds.), Readings in Managerial Psychology. University of Chicago Press.
  • Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 47–54.
  • Tyler, T. R. (2000). Social justice: Outcome and procedure. International Journal of Psychology, 35(2), 117–125.
  • Harvey, M., Novicevic, M. M., Buckley, M. R., & Halbesleben, J. R. B. (2004). The Abilene Paradox after thirty years: A global perspective. Organizational Dynamics, 33(2), 215–226.
  • Hart, P. (2012). Classics in Political Psychology Irving L . Janis ’ Victims of Groupthink. Political Psychology, 12(2), 247–278.