Why does your team not perform well? Research on psychological factors

What factors affect team performance?

Workplaces come in all shapes and sizes, with some being conducive to work and filled with people working eagerly on solving problems, while others are grim and dreary even first thing in the morning and have little capacity for problem solving.

When working, the ideal would be to be assigned to a team with great problem-solving abilities, but what kinds of factors affect the strength of a team?

The paper I discuss today summarizes research into the relationship between the difficulty of a task that a team faces and the tension in interpersonal relationships within the team, and the team’s performance.

What effects do the difficulty of the task and tension in interpersonal relationships have?

It would be rather difficult to determine how the difficulty of a task assigned to a team affects the team’s performance, but the slight difficulty of a task, a task that the team would probably be able to achieve if they put a small amount of effort into it, may improve the team’s performance.

Forgive this commonplace example, but when you have to put on a show at a Christmas party, your team works better together and the performance would improve, and if the task is gradual kaizen activity, rather than something drastic like revolutionary change to operations in the workplace, performance could improve then as well.

However, we can also foresee that if the task given to the team is overly difficult, the team would not be able to bring its inherent strengths to bear and its performance would decline.

It would be best if there were no tension in interpersonal relationships, but movies and TV dramas often use the trope where two people in a team who do not get along cause trouble and fight with each other, but through that they undergo a kind of chemical reaction and form a stronger team. So, we cannot automatically dismiss tension in interpersonal relationships as reducing team performance.

The paper I discuss today groups the data from a number of studies about the effects that task difficulty and tension in interpersonal relationships have on team performance.

According to the paper, the conventional understanding was:

• the difficulty of a task can improve team performance if it is at an appropriate level (if the level is too high, performance will drop); and
• tension in interpersonal relationships always lowers team performance,

but taking statistics from various research data shows that in fact, both task difficulty and tension in interpersonal relationships reduce (are in a negative correlation with) team performance as a whole.

But looking at this research, there are exceptions, of course, and the difficulty of a task may sometimes improve performance, but then what conditions and what times are required for this?

What are the conditions for the difficulty of a task to improve team performance?

This paper gives the following as conceivable conditions for team performance to improve even with difficult tasks:

• little tension in interpersonal relationships within the team;
• a cooperative team culture (members are not competing against each other);
• few critical opinions against opinions that are difficult to accept; and
• the team leader is excellent and specifically, has the ability to help other team members to resolve issues.

Personally, I believe that the disposition of the team leader will change the tensions and atmosphere of interpersonal relationships within the team, making the team leader the most important person in the team, and I wondered whether this may have something to do with the way that merit-based salary and HR assessments do not necessarily improve productivity.

Reference URL: Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: a meta-analysis.