Building the right team

Managers have a tendency to make the team too similar in personality and in talent. This is in part because leaders try to avoid conflict by selecting people who like each other. However, it is far more important to do good work than to avoid conflict. So, put aside political correctness and go for results! A study of one R&D company showed just how important heterogeneity is: teams that included both creative and conformist members were more likely to have a radical innovation, as compared to teams that included attentive-to-detail members, which hindered innovation. Creative members enhance conflict and hinder adherence to rules; conformists reduce conflict.

The team should be a motley crew when it comes to backgrounds, training, and thinking styles. In one study, for example, three types of teams were compared in terms of the accuracy of their decisions and the speed of their decisions. One team was composed of locomotorspeople who were primed to get things done and emphasize speed. A second team was composed of assessors people who were primed to think things through, collect a lot of data, and mull over things. Finally, a third team was a hybrid group, composed of both locomotors and assessors. The results? The locomotor team was the fastest, but the least accurate. The assessor team was the most accurate, but the slowest. Obviously, there was a trade-off: accuracy often comes at the cost of speed. But the hybrid team was both accurate and fast it effectively capitalized on the diverse strengths of its participants. In this sense, a synergistic gain resulted from combining both tortoises (slow, thoughtful, accurate people) and hares (fast, quick, get-it-done) people.

A near-ideal combination for maximizing creativity is a team diverse in terms of background, but similar in terms of thought categories. In other words, for group diversity to be maximally effective, the distances between the kinds of ideas that members bring to the table should not be too great because people need some basis for mutual understanding of ideas. For example, in one investigation, Asako Miura and his collaborator composed groups that were either high or low on diversity as defined by the range of different ideas that individual members brought to the task and high or low in terms of similarity as defined in terms of the amount of duplication of ideas they generated in an independent task. The results indicated that groups who were diverse in their range of ideas but similar in the kinds of ideas they generated were the most creative.

The Onion Principle
There are hundreds of ways to diversify. What's the best? Get to the inside of the onion. I often tell my students to think of diversity like an onion, meaning that there are several layers. On the outside of the onion are superficial characteristics, such as dress and appearance; the next layer is composed of characteristics such as race or ethnicity; deeper inside are education and values; and even deeper inside are fundamental personality characteristics and individual traits. It is more impactful to diversify at deeper levels. However, even superficial diversity (e.g., demographic and ethnic background) may improve creativity. One investigation compared all-white groups with groups composed of white, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American participants. In this study, the ideas produced by ethnically diverse groups were more effective, more feasible, and of higher quality than those produced by the homogenous groups. In another study, European Americans were more creative immediately after being exposed to American and Chinese cultures, and the effect lasted for seven days. However, other investigations have not found appreciable differences. So this type of diversity may be less reliable than deeper differences in instigating creative performance.

One problem with building diverse teams is that people tend to be attracted to homogeneous groups. A compounding problem is that even when people know they should be focusing on diversity the inside of the onion is hard to see. Ideally, we should compose teams that have deep-level diversity, but that is hard to do because sometimes those underlying skills, values, and orientations are just not obvious. What's more important than combining superficially homogeneous groups is maximizing the deep-level diversity (the inside of the onion) based on education, training, and experience. Teams with greater educational specialization heterogeneity working under transformational leaders are more creative than more homogeneous teams. In a landmark study of creativity in biotechnology laboratories in the United States and the United Kingdom, Kevin Dunbar studied teams of microbiologists and their laboratories. Some of the labs followed homogeneous hiring practices; some were heterogeneous. To be sure, the heterogeneous labs had more reported conflict, but they also produced significantly more patents!

Diversity has a number of benefits, in addition to increasing creative idea generation. For example, diversity can also provide a buffer when groups grow too large. In one study, six different numerical group sizes were studied, ranging from five to ten members. Whereas the average contributions per group member diminished with increasing group size for homogeneous groups, heterogeneous groups improved their performance.

Avoid the San Andreas Fault
According to Keith Murnighan, when some teams diversify, they create a dangerous fault line that calls negative attention to the team, which sets the team up for an earthquake. A fault line occurs in a team when there is a big divide along two or more dimensions among members.

CREATIVE CONSPIRACY: THE NEW RULES OF BREAKTHROUGH COLLABORATION
AUTHOR: Leigh Thompson
PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press
PRICE: Rs 995
ISBN: 9781422173343

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from: Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration by Leigh Thompson. Copyright 2013.

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