Consider a surgical team, a basketball team, a software development team. Maybe there’s a “star” player—the point guard, the surgeon—but all the members of the team are essential for the work to proceed. Surgeons need nurses and anesthesiologists. Software engineers need user-interface experts and quality testers. To complete the bypass, deliver the product, or win the game, everyone has to do their part in coordination with everyone else. “These are people whose work is really interdependent or whose work is evaluated collectively,” says McIntire Visiting Professor Virginia Stewart.
The Hidden Dynamics of Teams
Today, there may be no more ubiquitous feature of the workplace than “the team.” Employees are “team members.” There are team goals and team meetings and team-building activities. There are agile teams, cross-functional teams, virtual teams, scrum teams. Microsoft even named its widely used conferencing-and-collaboration tool Teams.
And yet, from a research perspective, says Stewart, organizational teams have long been perceived as something of a “black box.” Defying easy study, teams evolve across weeks, months, or longer, shaped by the complexities of group dynamics. How is trust established within teams? How are norms created? What motivates the members collectively? How does the team relate to the larger organization?
“There are a lot of things we know about individuals or organizations, but we don’t know about teams relative to individuals or organizations,” Stewart points out. “Things are shifting and changing within teams in a way you don’t see with individuals.”
Reciprocal Responsibility, Commitment, and Shared Purpose
Peering into that black box, however, has become increasingly important as organizations have moved from more traditionally hierarchical, vertical structure towards flatter, teams-based systems. With this shift in mind, Stewart and two fellow researchers set out to explore one key aspect of team dynamics: accountability.
As they write in the introduction to their study, published in the Journal of Business Ethics, “autonomous and empowered teams are increasingly seen as the basic building block of agile organizations,” but “existing accountability literature…views accountability as top-down compliance and formal mechanisms of control.” That is, as Stewart explains, organizations put a lot of focus on “managing behavior” and setting up systems of carrots and sticks in the hopes of driving motivation and commitment in employees.
But when a team steps onto the court, enters the operating room, or launches the project, what matters is something harder to quantify—a trust that everyone can count on each other to contribute their part. This kind of accountability, the researchers suggest, is “relational,” a felt experience of “reciprocal responsibility, commitment and shared purpose.” Stewart describes this as “feeling accountable to each other and the work, beyond or despite what management might want from you.” The question the researchers were curious to answer, says Stewart, is “Where does team accountability come from?”
To explore the nature of this kind of accountability, while also eliminating many of the variables that can make studying workplace teams challenging, the researchers created a study using 65 teams of business students. Each team engaged with the same simulation platform over the same three-month period, developing a virtual business and then competing against the other teams for market share and profits. To assess accountability, the researchers also developed and validated a new “Team Accountability Questionnaire” of eight questions such as “We hold each other accountable for doing our individual work” and “We can count on members to deliver what they promise.”
The results of the study confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that within a team, trust and accountability “build on and reinforce each other” and that when team members trust each other, they will also feel mutually accountable, committed, and willing to put in the effort and work collaboratively, regardless of how that teamwork will be formally evaluated. This is the glue that holds together volunteer search-and-rescue teams, the spirit that inspires us in stories of ragtag underdogs coming together against the odds. “The relationships on the team are really important,” Stewart points out. “Accountability only matters because you care about who you are accountable to.”
Study Surprises
But there were surprises from the study as well.
The first, says Stewart, was how quickly people on the teams were willing to commit to each other. “I was expecting team accountability to emerge slowly with time—and it certainly solidified,” says Stewart. “What surprised me was that team accountability was really high at the beginning.”
The flip side, however, was “how fixed accountability was to the start,” says Stewart. Teams that felt accountable at the beginning maintained that commitment throughout. The ones that didn’t “never really got there.” She points out that while organizations tend to focus more on the task than team development, this research suggests that strategy might need rethinking. “You have to get the start right, because it is really hard to go back and fix it,” she says. “Those early impressions are fixed.”
Another surprise? Even after controlling for so many variables, “we saw teams perform really differently even in the exact same conditions,” Stewart says. Perhaps even more unexpected, while high team accountability did predict how much effort teams continued to put in throughout the simulation, a “successful” team didn’t always equal “successful” results. “Feeling more accountable and putting in more hours didn’t change performance that much,” Stewart says.
The reason, she suggests, might well be that even the best teams are subject to the vagaries of random events and circumstances they can neither anticipate nor plan for. In the study’s simulation platform, market conditions and competing teams’ decisions, “external forces they didn’t know anything about,” says Stewart, affected how well each team performed. In real-world situations, the possible confounding factors are as many and varied as the teams that encounter them, from severe weather to supply-chain disruptions to the quarterback’s season-ending injury. Or a global pandemic.
“Many times, we hold people in teams accountable for things that are outside of their control,” Stewart points out.
For that reason, it’s important that organizations consider the benefits of teams that can’t be measured strictly in outcomes. In particular, in contrast to more formal accountability mechanisms, team accountability might actually be what makes people want to show up every day and do their best. “For sustaining motivation and keeping people engaged and caring about the work, that is where teams are helpful,” Stewart says. And in the study, team members who felt more accountable also reported feeling less lonely. In light of widely expressed concerns about a global “loneliness epidemic,” with significant costs in health and well-being, could a focus on building strong teams also help build a healthier and more resilient workforce?
Other interesting questions were raised by the research, too, Stewart says. How will team accountability change when one or more “teammates” are AI tools? If people are part of more than one team, how might that complicate accountability? How does accountability take shape in virtual and dispersed teams?
Ultimately, understanding teams is vital because teams are going to remain essential to tackling the increasingly complex challenges of a global 21st century, Stewart points out. “A lot of the problems that we are trying to address and solve are huge,” she says, “and one person can’t do it alone.”
