How do you organize a research team that promotes outstanding individuals?
We call stars employees who are truly outstanding among their peers — those who outperform them in talent, commitment, or knowledge.
Are you sure that being the best is about being respected and admired? Or is it that being engaged and effective will make our co-workers hate us?
A star can even be a threat to the steady management of a team, and an efficient employee may inadvertently, through his dynamics and commitment, show how unviable and weighty the thinking of a boss is.
New research has shown that a particular social punishment for being the best is more common in workplaces where cooperation is promoted. During recruitment, most companies prefer candidates who demonstrate a tendency toward teamwork.
While this is a closely guarded secret, the management of some companies for the sake of holiness avoids hiring outstanding people with exceptional commitment and skills.
W-MOSZCZYNSKI-2021-9-19Who's the star?
First, let's try to determine what qualities people have that can be considered stars. Stars are usually employees who have great initiative. They see work as more than just work. Each initiative and each new challenge is an opportunity for them to develop their own skills.
Out of a need for self-development, they also willingly help others. People for whom work is a pleasure are sociable and honest in their relationships. What drives them is the desire to learn and to face difficulties. They need broad acceptance and, to obtain it, are willing to undertake risky initiatives. When solving problems, they go beyond the limits of conventional thinking.
Because of their high self-esteem and self-confidence, they usually admit their mistakes easily.
Being a star is primarily a matter of personal characteristics. Most of these people don't take into account social costs and don't hold back their great initiative and commitment. Unfortunately, the punishment for being the best can significantly distort and weaken enthusiasm and desire for self-development.
In psychological literature there is a concept of a „fading star”. People described by this term no longer take pleasure in the results of their work, but often see them as the source of problems. After difficult experiences, they cease to cooperate with the team and choose solitary work. „Fading stars” are reluctant to admit mistakes and often try to conceal them at all costs. They can be ineffective, focusing unnecessarily on details.
Why do stars deserve social punishment?
Employees usually don't like a colleague who raises the bar and raises management expectations.
From this perspective, such people may seem dangerous to the team. A classic example is the phenomenon, known from management theory, of factory workers punishing colleagues for working too fast. Psychology indicates that when we compare ourselves with people who are better than us in a given area, we most often feel envy, discomfort or even fear.
Unfortunately, these uncontrolled emotions will affect our decisions and our behavior toward these people. The phenomenon of persecution of prominent individuals by average individuals has been documented in a large number of psychological studies, including one conducted by Elizabeth Campbell of the University of Minnesota!
The study involved 350 stylists working in 105 salons in Taiwan, and the hypothesis of the experiment was that salon workers tended to persecute and destroy the reputations of those who did the best at their jobs, while the average stylist was tolerant of those who did poorly.
Moreover, the more cooperative the team was, the worse the colleagues treated those who did better.
How do you work with the stars?
So far, we've outlined the characteristics of stars and tried to explain why these people don't get the respect of their peers or, less often, they cause uncertainty among their leaders.
On the other hand, there's no doubt that these people can be the driving force behind the growth of companies. They can make great successes for themselves and others by their commitment. Is it worth eliminating them and eliminating them from the environment? How can we deal with this dilemma?
An interesting direction was indicated by an experiment conducted on 284 employees working in an online environment. The employees were assigned to random teams working online.
1 Campbell, E. M., Liao, H., Chuang, A., Zhou, J., & Dong, Y. (2017). Hot shots and cool reception? An expanded view of social consequences for high performers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(5),845866. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000183
2 Marek Vranka, Marek HudikNikola Frollova, Stepan Bahnik, Markéta Sykorova, Petr HoudekHonesty of online workers: A field experiment shows no evidence of self-selection of cheaters to a cheating-enabling work environment, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Volume 94, November 2021, 101730
The teams were divided into more cooperative or more competitive teams doing a variety of tasks that forced their members to think analytically, and each team was a member of an artificial intelligence algorithm, and the rest of the experiment didn't know that.
This robotic team member far outperformed the other human team members in their analytical performance, and the results showed that the stars had different reactions to their teammates, depending on whether the team members were competing for resources or cooperating to pool resources.
The selection of the level of competition and collaboration was determined by the tasks assigned to the teams by the creators of the experiment.
If the resources were limited, the team members felt threatened by the competition of a highly efficient employee, and the worse the way the people of a prominent team member were vacating, the better they were than the rest of the team members, and the more they weakened the stars, creating a kind of alliance between themselves that was supposed to level the playing field.
If obtaining resources depended on cooperation, team members jointly benefited from the star’s work and thus socially supported the high-performing person. The researchers observed that stars were not attacked or harassed when their effectiveness was in the interest of all team members.
Conclusion
If we were to imagine a group of hunters from the Neolithic period, whose success depended on the survival of the whole group, would one of the great hunters and archers be persecuted by the rest of the team?
We recall the esteem that the air force enjoyed during the Battle of Britain and the important role that distinguished scientists played in the war.
This leads to the conclusion that the key factor supporting or excluding outstanding individuals in a team is the shared importance of their work. Management should use the commitment and talent of an outstanding individual to ensure that each team member benefits from having such a person in the team.
Stars that are building new levels of performance and competitive advantage are valuable to organizations, so the executives who manage them should be sensitive to signs of dissatisfaction, isolation and gradual loss of engagement.
Above all, they must organise a work environment that supports these people and provides benefits and safety for the rest of the team.
Wojciech Moszczyński — graduate of the Department of Econometrics and Statistics of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; specialist in econometrics, finance, data science, and management accounting. He specializes in the optimization of production and logistics processes. He conducts research in the area of the development and application of artificial intelligence. For years he has been engaged in the popularization of machine learning and data science in business environments.
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