The Greatest Asset Of Your Team Probably Isn’t In Your Team

 “Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud,
I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast,
scavenging for the scraps that may perchance
plummet off humanity’s dirty plates,
though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant
is more convenient.” —Patti Smith

The Greatest Asset Of Your Team Probably Isn’t In Your Team

Individuals who work well in a team, whether to complete a task or to solve a problem, may not be able to actually come to the best solution or completion. Why is that? Of course, there’s groupthink and all the complications that come along with working within a group—miscommunications, personality clashes, egocentrism. But even these aren’t the greatest hurdle to a team. It’s that they may be missing their most valuable tool for arriving at the best solution: the person who never joined them.

The process for effective problem solving within a group isn’t much different than the process used in applying interventions in social psychology. They are both aimed at solving a perceived problem. However, Dewey (1958) places more emphasis on a very key step: brainstorming, whereas applied social psychology goes straight from identifying the problem to determining what solution to implement (Oskamp & Schultz, 1997). Considering that the purpose of the process is presumably to come up with the most successful solution, it would stand to reason that, to do that, all options must be considered. In the brainstorming step, it would be crucial, then, to have people participating who would not only offer up the most common and tried solutions, but would consider and propose solutions beyond these—to offer creativeideas.

It benefits the group, and ultimately those who are affected by the group’s actions, to place no limits on the brainstorming step in the problem-finding process. Or, to paraphrase a common mantra of authors, “Write drunk, edit sober” (Vries, 2015). In this step, no idea should be excluded or judged. The purpose is to gather up every possible solution, both the obvious and the far-fetched, purposely reserving evaluation for another time. But what if brainstorming was limited even before this process began? What if the most creative ideas lie in the minds operating outside the group?

Individuals who are high in creativity would excel in offering up the most innovative solutions and plenty of them. But, wait, when the group was forming, how likely is it that the most creative available individuals opted to join? George and Feltz (1998) discovered that team members’ self-efficacy added to the collective efficacy of the team. That makes sense. But what if someone has such a high self-efficacy that they see no need to work within a team? Since there is a strong positive correlation of self-efficacy to creativity (Prabhu, Sutton, & Sauser 2008), that would leave the most creative individuals (and, therefore the most creative solutions) outside the resources of the team.

We know that one step in the process of team building is in the evolution of roles for the individual members (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012). As the philosopher Alan Watts (n.d.) frames this, teams are making use of the most basic of biological processes—”the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism: delegation of authority.” In other words, no one individual can or should perform every role within a group; it is the diversity of abilities of the individuals in these roles which enable the greatest functioning of it (Morawetz, Kirilina, Baudewig, & Heekeren, 2014). If an individual as a special talent for generating a nearly-endless list of possible solutions, that individual likely isn’t great at evaluating those same solutions and determining which are most viable, and vice versa. But efficiency of the group requires both of these skills. While we all may be proficient in each of these steps, if only from the sheer necessity of facing problems daily, it’s more likely that we are stronger in one skill than in the other. And that is why working with others who have different strengths brings about the best solutions.

If an individual does not excel in performing within a group setting, it does not mean that they have nothing to offer the process. In fact, they may have the greatest resource to offer the group: their unique ideas. However, individuals high in creativity are often low in agreeableness (Sung & Choi, 2009). This one trait both aggravates their cohesiveness within groups and also affords them the socially-contrary ideas others may not consider, which may become invaluable to reaching a solution. It is important to remember, then, that the forming of a team or group which will hold the greatest ability to expand thinking, cultivate knowledge, and bring about real progress will be the group which considers perspectives from outside itself, expands conventional roles, and also incorporates individuals who may not initially appear to be cohesive to the group. It is important to recognize that “working well with others” is not the only characteristic to examine when forming groups and that doing so may exclude the very members who can best move the group forward to obtaining its goals.

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References

Brown, C. (2016, February 23). Diary: Patti Smith. Vanity Fair. Retrieved October 7, 2018, from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/07/patti-smith-201107

Dewey, J. (1958). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

George, T.R., & Feltz, D.L. (1995). Motivation in sport from a collective efficacy perspective. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 26,98-116.

Morawetz, C., Kirilina, E., Baudewig, J., Heekeren, H.R. (2014) Relationship between Personality Traits and Brain Reward Responses when Playing on a Team. PLoS ONE 9(1): e87277. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087277

Oskamp, S., & Schultz, P.W. (1997). Applied social psychology (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Prabhu, V., Sutton, C., & Sauser, W. (2008). Creativity and Certain Personality Traits: Understanding the Mediating Effect of Intrinsic Motivation. Creativity Research Journal, 20(1), 53-66. doi:10.1080/10400410701841955

Sung, S. Y., & Choi, J. N. (2009). Do Big Five Personality Factors Affect Individual Creativity? the Moderating Role of Extrinsic Motivation. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 37(7), 941-956. doi:10.2224/sbp.2009.37.7.941

Vries, P. D. (2015). Reuben, Reuben: A novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Watts, A. (n.d.). Just Trust the Universe. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/iHcxkmwBOJY Original lecture date and location unknown, c. 1960-70, California.

 

 

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