'One Team' To Rule Them All

How do you get people to collaborate across a business - to operate as 'One Team'? Given that deep expertise is what differentiates one organization from the rest, more and more businesses are switching from a regional structure to a functional one, in which expert functions call the shots. But to reap the value of these specialized functions, teams have to collaborate efficiently across physical, cultural and time-based divides. The challenge for business leaders lies in helping their workforce do so. 'One Team', or a version thereof, is a core value of an overwhelming number of organizations. There’s a lot of talk about removing silos and pooling resources. But what does working as “one team” actually mean? According to a team of American psychologists, there are two important aspects to successful collaboration . The first is how much people rely on each other to get the job done, and the second is the extent to which their rewards depend on group achievements. By analyzing the results of 107 studies into teamwork and performance, including data from over 7,500 teams, the authors discovered that these two conditions for collaboration have different effects on performance. The more team members have to collaborate on a task, the better their performance on that task. The reasoning goes that the more team members rely on each other for information or resources, the more they’ll interact and communicate. And the more they communicate, the more competent they’ll realize each other are – increasing the team’s shared belief that they’ll succeed. High self-belief in turn boosts performance. In comparison, self-sufficient individuals might have no clue as to their colleagues’ capabilities.