Compliments to the Chef: Biting into Team Cohesion

While food may not be the first thing that comes to mind when looking at what makes a team successful, I’d like to present some reasoning behind the seasoning for your chewing pleasure. Have you ever gone to a restaurant and ordered a plate of broccoli? No steak or chicken, no potatoes or even some cheese to cover your broccoli in? Well, I would hope we all have not had the unfortunate experience of a lone food item for dinner. I think it is safe to say whether we enjoy more meaty entrees or prefer vegan options, we still choose some variety. This same concept can be applied to how cohesion works and how variety is key when it comes to team cohesion.

In order to look at team cohesion, we first have to look at the ingredients that make it work. According to Carron and colleagues (1997), there are four main ingredients involved in cohesion. It is multidimensional, like potatoes being baked, mashed, or fried. It is also dynamic or constantly changing like the avocado you just bought that has probably already gone bad. Cohesion also includes affectivity, or the feelings and emotions that members feel toward one another. With good affectivity it would be like a nice, cooked carrot in warm soup or bad like the crunchy carrot in cold soup. I think we all could agree the soup feels better cooked and warm just like members of a team sharing good feelings toward one another. The last ingredient for cohesion is its need to be instrumental. The team may not spend much time together but there is a shared ideal to meet a goal. This is most similar to pickle and peanut butter sandwiches, they aren’t normally seen together, but to some they reach the ultimate goal of tasting good (I think).

With this basis on a recipe for success we can now look at how variety (like the pickle and peanut butter sandwich) is better for team cohesion. As previously stated, we usually don’t have a meal consisting of mass amounts of just one item. We try to create variations of foods or food groups most times. We could eat an entire plate of our favorite meat, but it probably wouldn’t bode well for our gastrointestinal tract. The same way we want to prevent ourselves from overindulging in one food, we don’t want our teams to be made of the same types of members. This is what is called having complimentary attributes (Gruman et al., 2017). You don’t make a stew with just gravy. A successful and filling stew also comes with meat, potatoes, chopped veggies, spices. Each aspect of the stew has a different job to create a one homogenous dish, while the ingredients still maintain their own identities. Like stew, teams need both leaders and followers, pranksters and more serious members, those who pump the team up and those who can calm everyone down.

When we revisit affectivity and instrumental facets, we also find the overall themes of cohesion, social and task cohesion. These two aspects can be thought of as whatever two ingredients you always want to have on hand for your favorite recipes. It could be butter and garlic or more diverse like milk and hot sauce. All of the ingredients may have their place in a recipe, but not all may work best together. For social cohesion we can compare it to milk and hot sauce. They may be best friends in the kitchen, but more times than not they won’t be the only two ingredients you would add to your dinner. Likewise, high social cohesion within a team doesn’t guarantee they will accomplish the intended goal. Now if we look at butter and garlic who are both dead set on making a dish delicious, it is similar to task cohesion. Task cohesion means that perhaps the ingredients are not great pals but they both are very focused on the same goal. Either way, teams can vary between levels of social and task cohesion in the same way our two favorite ingredients may work better for one recipe and not another.

After getting the dish on team cohesion, we can now look at teams in terms of both individuals and as a unit. Like ordering or cooking our favorite meal, team cohesion takes a multitude of ingredients, variation in how they work together, and the shared drive of ultimately reaching a chosen goal. I hope that this information was able to both expand your understanding and possibly your palate.

 

References

Carron, A. V., Brawley, L. R., & Widmeyer, W. N. (1997). The measurement of cohesiveness in sport groups. In J. L. Duda (Ed.), Advances in sport and exercise psychology measurement. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology.

Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017). Applied social psychology : understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Sage.

1 comment

  1. This is an excellent example of team cohesion. Everyone plays a role in making sure that the food is prepped, cooked, and served. Not only is it served but served to the highest standards. To keep people coming back you have to have time management. Without working together time management is gone. Making sure that all the finishing touch’s are present to make the best possible outcome. Good display, timely fashion, and great taste. A chef’s kitchen is there castle. A chef’s team is of the highest importance!

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