وضعیت و روابط در معضلات اجتماعی تیم ها

A social dilemma occurs when it is optimal for each member of a team to act in his own interest but, if all participants do so, everyone is worse-off than if they had done otherwise. Social dilemmas are often observed in operational processes involving teamwork, such as developing new products or implementing total quality programs. The extent to which an employee cooperates with others is driven not only by material incentives but also by social preferences: individuals have an interest in the welfare of others as well as their own. Two known social preferences are status and relationship maintenance. Multiple studies have shown that status seeking leads team members to compete more whereas relationship building leads them to cooperate more. The question remains of whether these two preferences can coexist and complement one another (as when status seeking triggers effort and relationship building encourages cooperation) or whether they are at odds. In this experimental study we demonstrate that these two social preferences hinder one another: status reduces the collaboration benefit from relationships, and increases only individual, but not collaborative, effort. These results suggest that managerial interventions that promote status seeking and relationship building behavior cannot easily be used simultaneously when motivating teams to perform in situations involving social dilemmas.

Teamwork is commonly used in firms’ operations activities. Over years of modern production and operations management practice, the use of teams has become a norm for problem-solving activities, new product development (NPD), or total quality management (TQM) (Hackman and Wageman, 1995 and Pagell and LePine, 2002). Teams are important in the continuous improvement of established processes, and especially in critical operations activities that are organized as projects, for example, information system implementation, and new factory design project (Lawler and Cohen, 1992). Beyond operations within an organization, teamwork has also gained popularity in cross-organizational collaborations facilitated by modern technology, e.g., collaborative teams to respond custom requests between supply chain partners (Keenan and Ante, 2002). A typical team structure is the cross-functional (or nondedicated) team whose members work for their regular home department as well as for a joint task together with members from other departments (Lawler and Cohen, 1992 and Wang and He, 2008). For example, an NPD team usually combines R&D engineers, manufacturing engineers, and people from the marketing department. Teams often have a temporary structure, assembling members with diverse background and expertise and disbanding when the assigned work is finished. The team, as a whole, integrates efforts and contributions from different functions to achieve its goal. Lawler et al. (1992) report that cross-functional teams are implemented by 85% of Fortune 1000 companies for their TQM programs. Members of a cross-functional team often face the following social dilemma: collaboration could produce a better outcome for all, but it is not fully attainable because individuals are tempted to pursue their own goals while free riding on others’ contributions. Social dilemmas are common in work situations that require collaboration. In particular, cross-functional team members must allocate their capacity between collaboration and their regular individual jobs. In the presence of the free-riding temptation, it has been a management challenge to design incentives to foster collaboration in teams. Individual (competitive) versus team-based (cooperative) rewards have long been studied separately from one another, and there seems to be a consensus supporting competitive allocations when people are working independently but collaborative allocations when people are interdependent ( Beersma et al., 2003, Deutsch, 1949, Miller and Hamblin, 1963, Rosenbaum et al., 1980, Stanne et al., 1999 and Wageman, 1995). Yet the question of whether individual and team-oriented rewards can be combined has not been answered. While a reward can be individual or team-oriented, it is not only formal (from incentives) but also informal (peer relationships, recognition of a relative social “status” rank for which people compete). An opportunity to play both motivational sides is widespread in operations—for example, in total quality management (TQM) and new product development (NPD) teams. Should the creation of improvement ideas be rewarded individually (e.g., through a bonus per idea, or recognition for individual ideas) or at the level of the team (e.g., a team bonus, or gratitude from peers)? This range of motivations is relevant in other functions, such as sales, where managers use status competition to elicit effort from sales representatives (Kalra and Shi, 2001) as well as collegial relationships to elicit collaboration (Jones et al., 2005). Could behavioral and informal rewards be used together to influence behavior? Or would they get in each other's way? We pose our research question more formally as follows: Can the nonmonetary behavioral rewards of status (individual) and positive relationship (group) act as complementary motivations – improving individual performance and group cooperation both – or would they have contradictory, self-canceling effects? In other words, should the manager who is attempting to motivate a team play both angles, competitive and collaborative, or will this backfire? Answers to these questions would make a contribution to reward theory by exploring the interaction effect of individual and team-oriented informal rewards in the context of behavioral operations management ( Bendoly et al., 2006, Bendoly et al., 2010 and Loch and Wu, 2007). Our study also contributes to the literature examining behavioral regularities that, in addition to team compensation, should be carefully managed (see Wang and He, 2008, and the references therein). We design a laboratory experiment with human subjects to answer our research question. Our experimental design recreates the typical structure of cross-functional teams in that the team members must balance the effort on their individual tasks and the effort devoted to teamwork. Our results suggest that combining status and relationship motivations risks backfiring and thus undermining both motivations. These results contribute to behavioral operations management by illuminating trade-offs between various “soft” managerial influence levers.

5.1. Implications Both relationship maintenance and status have been widely acknowledged as behavioral motivators that work alongside “rational” material incentive motivators in team and group settings. Thus, it is possible to solicit effort from people by appealing to their desire to honor relationships and also by according them more recognition and status than others (Huberman et al., 2004 and Uzzi, 1996). But can these behavioral motivators be combined to increase effort and performance? How do they interact? Our examples in Section 1 suggest that one might push both motivational levers simultaneously: status for encouraging individual effort and relationships for safeguarding collaboration. The examples represent common collaborative team situations in which social dilemmas express the trade-off between contributing to the group and focusing on one's individual pursuits. Our experimental results corroborate previous findings that, within groups of interdependent actors, relationship maintenance is more appropriate than status as an emotional lever for encouraging efficient effort allocation in a social dilemma. Relationships boost not only total effort but also the transfer of effort from individual activity to cooperation and contribution for the social good of the group (or pair, in our experimental set-up). In contrast, status is a dangerous instrument to use in collaborative group tasks when social dilemmas and free riding can arise. First, status seeking leads to competition because it means striving for a relative outcome, a rank. Therefore, in social dilemmas (i.e., situations characterized by interdependence) it fails to motivate additional collaborative effort. Second, status seeking encourages individuals to shift their effort from cooperation to individual tasks. Third, the interaction between status and relationship is negative: status seeking has the negative externality of destroying the collaborative motivation and benefits of team relationships. Our experiment employs weak manipulations with only verbal cues (regarding relationships) and screen feedback (regarding status) and imposes anonymity among participants. The significance of the observed effects suggests robustness with respect to how people would be intrinsically motivated by social preferences in actual teamwork situations, where contact is face-to-face and where status competition and relationships both tend to be stronger than in our setup. These findings contribute to motivational theory by combining the effects of relationships and status and by demonstrating a negative interaction. The effects of status and relationships do not “mix” in social dilemmas; rather, our results indicate that status competition may negate the cooperation motivation stemming from relationships. Our results are also relevant to organizations. The insight that status recognition and relationships do not mix well can be translated into rules for motivation: Use status motivators when people work alone but not when they need to collaborate in teams. If team collaboration is required, give the team recognition as a whole but do not exalt any individuals; our experiments indicate that singling out individuals runs the risk of pushing team members toward competitive behavior that could negate their collaborative efforts. The results reported here are connected also to the structure of incentives. It is well known that any monetary reward carries a status signal: because status expresses an implicit valuation, a monetary payment relates not only to the recipient's resource desire but also to her evaluation relative to others (Ridgeway and Walker, 1995). In this context, our results could be relevant to the structure of incentive pay; in particular, they suggest that team incentives may boost both effort and collaboration by reducing status inequality (contrary to observations that team incentives dull effort motivation in the context of innovation activity; see Van de Ven et al., 1999: 200–201). Our results also suggest that a manager must carefully target individual recognition schemes (e.g., “employee of the month” awards) because they might push the team into a competitive mode that, if our experimental results generalize, ultimately fail to induce team members to put forth greater effort. We regularly visit factories in the course of a multi-country annual competition for a manufacturing management prize (which evaluates their management methods), and we still see some plants that are managed with a traditional Tayloristic view, where workers are viewed as unconnected individuals who are motivated only by incentives—by and large, the results are no longer competitive. In contrast, we also see plants that recognize the strong emotional character of workers in teams and organizations, and the best managers do give status and recognition (from the top), and they do foster relationships and group identity, which gives the workers a desire to do well for their peers. This results in better performance (measurable in higher improvement rates and quality levels), and the workers even say to the evaluators that their main motivation is not money but the interactions with others. Similarly, TQM managers have reported to us, in the context of factory evaluations (Loch et al., 2003), that they have abandoned individual rewards for improvement ideas. These managers have found that individual prizes and recognition encouraged workers to keep ideas for themselves and to reduce collaboration in the team, even when group rewards were also present. If the discipline of OM wants to understand and incorporate such phenomena, it should pay attention to social preferences (and, more broadly, behavioral OM). 5.2. Limitations and future research Of course, experimental results are merely suggestions and do not, in general, allow precise predictions of behavior. Experiments must focus on carefully chosen comparisons, leaving constant many other important factors of influence. For example, there was no peer pressure among participants in our experiments. Yet peer pressure among team members who monitor one another in order to prevent cheating may mitigate the negative effect of status seeking. In capturing social dilemmas, our experimental design is sufficiently general and flexible to accommodate future studies that focus on other important factors of projects in more realistic settings. For example, collaboration is also influenced by the project's uncertainty and complexity, which can frequently require input from members with differentiated knowledge and skills (e.g., a significant Six Sigma improvement project needs input from multiple departments, and new product development needs contributions from both marketing and engineering). Investigating those factors will offer more insights in specific project situations. Future work can also test the robustness of our findings in different parameter regions and with different group sizes. Another reason for care in applying the results of our experimental games lies in the assumed economic production structure, whereby workers are interdependent and collaboration is desired. Performance under such a production structure is positively affected by collaborative effort. We know from previous work (see Beersma et al., 2003) that-in tasks featuring worker independence (e.g., specialized professional analysis), where performance is measured by personal achievement-individual rewards work better and that the interaction between individual and group rewards may also change. In such situations, the impact of relationships and status might also be different from what our results suggest. For example, a preference for relationships may induce people to work more on joint tasks and to reduce independent work. More generally, the interaction of status and relationship factors should be measured in multiple case studies in real organizations—where, for example, different styles of managers may create settings for fruitful “natural experiments” that can be exploited to gain further insights into the role of various motivational drivers of team collaboration and effort. This is an important research agenda, since evidence is mounting that social preferences are significant drivers of behavior in operational processes and other economic transactions. It is valuable to understand how social preferences operate and interact in ways that allow systematic consideration of how groups are, and may be, managed.