Knowledge-Diverse Work Teams Benefit from Fluid Hierarchies:
Co-workers who team up to solve problems or work on projects can benefit when they have less in common and take turns spotlighting their different expertise, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. The findings have implications for how managers can better form and manage teams so all voices are heard.
Groups of workers with varied knowledge — or "knowledge-diverse teams" — share more information among group members, a key trait of effective teamwork. [...]
"For teams, instability is often seen as a negative," Gray said. "But we found a scenario in which instability is helpful. Within a diverse team, this type of fluidity helps members bolster their position and standing by demonstrating their expertise and unique value."
Even so, homogenous teams — ones made up of members with similar knowledge and skills — share more when members' influence over time is stable.
A knowledge-diverse new product development team could include a scientist, engineer, operations expert and a marketer, while a startup team may have a chief technology officer, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer. In contrast, a homogenous team might be made of sales members who do the same task but may have different kinds of customers.
[...] Workers who are a part of a knowledge-diverse team where influence diverges should know that by sharing information, they can demonstrate their worth to co-workers and gain greater influence and trust within the team. Gray said managers need to understand that it's insufficient to bring together people with diverse knowledge and simply set them on a task. Instead, managers of knowledge-diverse teams need to think about how they can help to elevate different viewpoints as tasks evolve. Managers of homogenous teams should mull how they might promote stability so members don't compete for status.
What were the makeups of the best and worst collaborative teams you've worked on? Is any of this important, or do the variabilities in skills and experience between people wash all this out and team effectiveness is just one big stochastic crapshoot?
Journal Reference:
Steven M. Gray et al., Leveraging Knowledge Diversity in Hierarchically Differentiated Teams: The Critical Role of Hierarchy Stability, Acad Manage J, 2022
DOI: 10.5465/amj.2020.1136
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @05:59AM
Maybe if your team has a philosopher from, oh, 2nd or 3rd Century BC, to add to the diversity of opinions, and bringing much experience? No? To hot to handle?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday May 29 2022, @10:04AM (1 child)
The companies that I've worked in have all had communication problems. Usually most low level managers (who managed me) were being jerked around by high level managers. I don't see how managers will benefit in any way unless they aren't being jerked around by upper management, understand the personalities and talents contained within each person, actively listen, and actively manage based on relevant information. Many managers fail to listen to their employees.
I've noticed most managers are all about quickly defining a problem and quickly dictating a solution to be executed. The slow burn problems are particularly not well managed. Complex problems are not well understood.
Within the team itself, I've had mixed results. Normally, I'm a quiet person, so whenever I want to say something, I'm typically ignored. I've found in large teams, to be listened to, one has to be loud and sure of themselves. There are only handful of people I've met that can be loud, sure of themselves, and usually correct. (Doesn't mean they are necessarily listened to.) The more people there are, the worse this phenomenon. I've had better luck speaking my mind in smaller teams, but then the diversity angle is lost and problems with group think grow.
My personal experience indicates a crapshoot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 29 2022, @07:46PM
The tragedy is how very poor we still are at many aspects of running organizations. We use democracy at the national level, but at the corporate level, it's still very medieval. Thanks to our custom of ownership, especially inheritance, it is sadly common to turn a good company over to an inept arrogant dipshit, treacherous weasel, or sadistic psycho. Even reasonably skilled leaders often feel too insecure or arrogant to consult and get advice, and go ahead with what turns out to be an astonishingly stupid move that a child would've known better than to try. We have this idea of "crew resource management" for handling emergencies with flying airplanes, but not for running companies. One of the craziest ideas floating around is that a person can be "overqualified", and is "too smart". Such thinking is what comes of heeding the climate of denigration around education. One of the biggest problems is that there's a notion going around that maybe, sociopathy is necessary in a CEO.
A finding that "different expertise" can benefit the team should've been known and confirmed long ago. That's teamwork 101. Loudmouth con artists enjoy way too much success thanks to organizations being not just bad but also careless about evaluating people. Often, they don't know what they should be measuring, having glommed onto the latest management fad about getting around those pesky rules about fairness and eliminating bias, failing to see that being fair is a really good idea, not an impediment. They are apt to see loudmouths in a good light, as vigorous and assertive people who get things done.
The easiest, most braindead, and bad way to run an organization is to treat it like a slave plantation. Way too many managers think that way. It's lazy and cruel. Who needs to bother getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals when you can just treat them all as disposable cogs, to be whipped and beaten to get the maximum effort out of them, then discarded when worn or burnt out. Worse is the addition of a criminal element. The slaves are put under extreme pressure to break all kinds of laws, and, of course hung out to dry if they do it and the company is caught.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday May 29 2022, @01:55PM
> What were the makeups of the best and worst collaborative teams you've worked on? Is any of this important, or do the variabilities in skills and experience between people wash all this out and team effectiveness is just one big stochastic crapshoot?
I would say it depends on the problem. If the problem is clear and shit just has to be done and resolved and the solution is know then it's better if everyone is just the same and on the same page and get shit done. If there is an issue you have to probe and look at from a few different angles to come to a proper solution having different perspectives help, to a certain degree. So even an echo chamber sometimes have its uses as not all "problems" really have to be discussed in depth or looked at from all the various perspectives. Even tho it seems that the method or preferred team working experiences currently is where the input and feelz from everyone is valued and equal and all that jazz. Which I guess also at least partially explains why people hate meetings ...
Even with that in mind I guess one can never rule out the fun of randomness. Even the easiest problems can go to hell when the known unknowns or unknown unknowns appear ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @03:29PM
If you have a team whose collective job is to do one thing, such as network administration, there's really no point to having a marketer and a medic and an anthropologist on the team. Ergo any analysis suggesting that there are values to having such varied skills on a team is predicated on the kind of problem scope and context where those skills or approaches make some kind of sense. This is more applicable to the wide-open sort of situation that you'd find in a startup, where you need a team to cover a wide set of skills and where each will have a particular role to play in the context of the challenge. This doesn't mean that it's a somehow random environment.
In other words, I question the whole basis to this study's approach.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @08:34PM
hahaha, lol: "as tasks evolve".
the goal has not been defined, thus, let's throw a bunch of "diverse" together and see if we can hash out what we want to do :)
srsly, tho, if there's a goal or "general target area" and not just one "maximize profit", then sure, different view points and backgrounds are a "good thing(tm)".
problem is, it's just very rarely that the goal isn't defined VERY clearly, and that is:" maximize profits!"
which kindda negates hiring and involving people not maximally suited to the goal?
most of the time, it is this "throw a bunch of diverse together" situation that brings up new ideas or possibilities. unfortunately this doesn't happen on paid time but in the bar or other social off-hour places.. only to be exploited MAXIMALLY on paid-time :)
(Score: 1) by jman on Monday May 30 2022, @01:49PM
One worked for Motorola designing circuits. He could solder like a demon. Had a few patents under his belt. For raw intelligence, he was probably the smartest of us.
One repaired pinball machines and juke boxes (but left any serious soldering to the other one), and had an enormous amount if innate engineering expertise. He could move a pool table by himself (well, the tommy-lift on the pickup truck did help a bit). I learned an awful lot about balancing force from him. To paraphrase Archimedes, it's all about choosing the right lever. He had the most common sense.
I was the interface between the two, also coder and general problem solver. I can talk to anyone, and reduce whatever the issue is down to its basis so all can understand.
Between the three of us: Need a circuit to do this? No problem? Need it to fit in a box this big? No problem! Need a cool name for it, or a way to present the idea / product to other humans? No problem!
The other two were often in their own worlds, really good at what they did but not so good at communicating their skills. Whenever we got together, it was that rare gestalt where things actually got done, without (much) stupid argument or fighting!