Sunday, December 08, 2024

Do You Really Want a Team Full of Self-Starters?


Is it effective to have many proactive members on your team?   You might think the answer is quite obvious.   Who wouldn't want a set of self-starters on a team?  Well, think again.  Kyle J. Emich and his co-authors have written an interesting new paper titled "Better Together: Member Proactivity Is Better for Team Performance When Aligned with Conscientiousness."  Interestingly, they used the Everest Simulation that I co-authored with Amy Edmondson as the basis for one of two studies conducted for this paper.   

These scholars find that the alignment of proactivity with conscientious leads to the best results.  In other words, teams are most effective if highly proactive individuals are also quite conscientious.  Meanwhile, teams are better off if the least conscientious members are not very proactive.   Why does this alignment (high-high and low-low) work best for teams?  The scholars find that it leads to more effective coordination among team members. They write:

At the outset of this paper, we asked how organizations should create teams that are proactive, but that also engage in the planning necessary to coordinate that proactivity and perform well. Taken together, our studies reveal that teams in which member proactivity and conscientiousness align within team members across the team are more coordinated and perform better than teams in which these attributes are unaligned.

It makes intuitive sense to me.  You do not want self-starters who take initiative, but then are unlikely to do the hard work required to follow through on their commitments.  We have all been part of groups in which some people don't fulfill their commitments.  Think about the Project Aristotle research project conducted at Google by Julia Rozovsky.  She and her colleagues studied more than 150 teams at Google, and they tried to identify the attributes that distinguished the highest performing teams from the lowest.  Dependability was one of the five key characteristics of the highest performing teams.  In those groups, members could count on others to do what they said they would do.  

9 comments:

muskan said...

"This is a great perspective on team dynamics! Proactivity is essential, but aligning it with conscientiousness truly makes a difference in team performance."
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abhay said...

"It makes sense that proactive individuals need to be responsible and follow through. Without dependability, even the best ideas can fall apart."
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aman said...

"I love the idea of aligning traits like proactivity with conscientiousness. It's not just about taking initiative, but ensuring follow-through too."
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Techno worlds said...

"The correlation between conscientiousness and proactivity seems so logical. A team of self-starters without conscientiousness could cause more problems than progress."
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getindustrialproducts said...

"Great insights! It reminds me of how critical trust and accountability are in a team setting. If people can’t count on each other, the team’s success is at risk."
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SHUBHAM said...

"I agree with the point that you don’t want 'self-starters' who don’t fulfill commitments. This is where dependability plays a vital role in team performance."
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onlinepromotionhouse22@gmail.com said...

"I found the reference to Google's Project Aristotle fascinating. Dependability truly is one of the keys to effective teamwork. Without it, things just fall apart."
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Nishi8171 said...

"The research on aligning proactivity with conscientiousness is eye-opening. It shows how teamwork requires not just individual drive, but also responsibility."
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shivaniwebdesigning said...

"This post highlights something essential in team building: people need to balance initiative with the discipline to finish what they start. Great read!"
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