Compassionate Teams: Research and Ideas.

Covid-19 is impacting people in different ways depending on who they are, what they do, and what they’re coping with outside work. This diversity of challenges can be effectively addressed at local level, when managers and teams react compassionately to changing demands and individual pressures.

This research, compiled by Alina Gutoreva and Zsofia Belovai, would usually sit behind our public thinking. We’ve made it open-source so anyone can use it.

Get in touch

If you’re interested in working with us, don’t hesitate to drop us an email.

Prosocial Teams

Any team comprises of people with different temperaments, needs, and aspirations. The ‘glue’ is social coherence - caring and closeness, enjoyment of other’s company or social time together, and the emotional bonds of friendship within the team members (Forsyth, 2010). Increases in group cohesion can significantly improve team performance (Grant, 2008) and the Covid-19 pandemic bring two unique opportunities to strengthen this dynamic:

1. Social cohesion can be significantly improved via the digital communications we’re all using right now (Beauregard et al., 2019).

2. The knowledge that employees’ have a prosocial impact - that their efforts enhance welfare of other people*- is linked to their wellbeing and job performance.

The first point is covered extensively elsewhere, so below we focused on four factors that may interact with the prosocial intent:

1- Competing Priorities

Why we care. There always will be trade-offs in our personal and work life. This is due to a fundamental problem - the interaction of self vs. others (see ‘social dilemma’, e.g. Fehr & Schurtenberger, 2018). Now, when people grapple with dramatic changes to their personal life, work might slip to a lower place on their priority list - and that is not as surprising as we transition to a new normal .

What we should do. There are ways to make this transition smoother with the help of your team. Informal chats and reflections on individual experience can reduce stress levels and put people back on track. For those who worry about the productivity of such initiatives, we’d say now is not the time. But the increases in group bonds you make today, will create an environment of increased trust and coordination. And that, in turn, will lead to higher performance as we return to whatever normal may be in the months to come (Grant, 2008).

2- Trust

Why we care. “There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. Indeed, when many of us work from home, trust can facilitate relationships and decrease stress. Trust is especially important for highly interdependent teams since they rely on each other to work successfully (Forsyth, 2010).

What we should do. One way to increase trust in teams is to share personal experiences - when people share something personal about their lives, they open the opportunity to reciprocate. One study that looked at over 7,700 teams, found that increase in trust had a positive effect on performance and helped the teams to achieve goals (De Jong, Dirks & Gillespie, 2016).

Trust can be increased in working face to face as well as virtual environment. When supervising remote workers, managers must rely on output-related metrics and alternative monitoring techniques, utilising technology as well as trust, to both evaluate and manage performance quality and quantity (Beauregard et al., 2019).

3- Sense of Belonging

Why we care. Belonging is a fundamental human need, and can be described as a sense of having positive relationships with others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Cacioppo, 2008). Belonging in the workplace can be influenced by communication and clarity on expectations, roles and responsibilities, mutual respect and caring, and a sense of commitment to common goals. A sense of belonging to a greater community improves motivation, health, and happiness. It is important for performance and motivation in the workplace, in general (Bartel, Wrzesniewski & Wiesenfeld, 2012).

What we should do. Belonging is a natural aspect of social relationships - it appears in any group form. One study showed that providing students a narrative that framed social adversity as being shared among ALL other students encouraged them to see their low sense of belonging as a common and transient adjustment to the novel environment of college life (Walton & Cohen, 2011). In other words, how the current situation is explained can affect resilience and productivity of employees. When used appropriately, communication via virtual environment can facilitate shared understanding and help remote workers to feel connected to their team (Morgan & Symon, 2002).

4- Psychological Safety

Why we care. Personal life and work now happen in the same place - our homes. The normalisation of the ‘human’ part of employees (such as kids and pets flying into our video calls!) is inevitable in this unplanned transition to working from home. But, it can be great news if you have been striving to improve psychological safety in your team. Psychological safety can be described as the climate where people feel safe to take interpersonal risks by speaking up and sharing concerns, questions or ideas and it contributes greatly to picking up risks, improved learning and sharing of ideas (Edmondson, 2002).

What we should do. Psychological safety has been shown to develop commitment by promoting learning and increasing engagement. When employees feel challenged but not threatened, they can sustain the broaden-and-build mode** in their teams that improves innovation and performance (Delizonna, 2017). Taking a ‘just like me’ perspective - e.g. “my colleague has anxieties and vulnerabilities, just like me” (Rozovsky, 2015) - can be a good starting point in improving psychological safety in your team.

**The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions suggests that positive emotions broaden one's awareness and encourage novel, varied, and exploratory thoughts and actions (Fredrickson, 2004).

Prosocial Managers

One of the weirdest things about the current situation is an absence of social norms - ‘what are we supposed to do’. In this context, employees will seek support and acceptance from their peers. Managers have a special position here, since depending on how they react to the changes, they can foster or dampen team interaction and productivity. Managers need to spot the people that are struggling or stressed, to bring isolated teammates into the group and to foster social connections - this is what employees need the most now (Gallo, 2020).

Managers often engage in prosocial behavior, if it serves companies’ long term business prospects (Orlitzky et al., 2011). However, it pays to be caring in a broader sense too: firms have higher revenue when CEOs are rated by their CFOs as leaders who care more about the organisation’s success than their own. Prosocial motives among CEOs also matter for corporate social responsibility. When CEOs have pro-social values, they pay more attention to their employees, the government, and invest more in the community (Gulati, 2018).

1- Empowerment

Why we care. Freedom in a corporate context can still be viewed by many as an ‘impossible dream’ (Gulati, 2018). But empowerment at work promises an increase in commitment, performance and innovation. These three things should be compelling enough to expand employee autonomy, especially now, when it is almost impossible to supervise people directly.

What we should do. Too much control can be detrimental for employees’ sense of responsibility and well-being. Self-determination theory states that autonomy, competence and belonging are essential for employee psychological health and facilitates effective functioning in organisation social settings. The freedom to experiment in working styles and employee self-expression is beneficial, but most managers are still afraid to embrace it. This is understandable - freedom is still perceived as the antagonist to productivity even though this shown to be not the case (e.g. Gallup, 2018). We will test that principle more than anything else in the months ahead.

2- Establishing the norm

Why we care. Managers play a great role in employees’ personal lives, which in turn affects productivity and morale. Apart from that managers have a special position in this regard, they also possess or are perceived to possess a combination of valuable characteristics such as authoritativeness, trustworthiness and competence. Indeed, people pay a lot of attention to who is communicating information since they judge the person on different characteristics including authoritativeness, trustworthiness and competence, in order to decide whether the information is worth internalising (Martin & Marks, 2019).

What we should do. The messenger effect (Dolan et. al, 2012) suggests that who delivers information is key to how well the information is received and how it is utilised. Using the power of messenger effect, managers should provide a direction for employees in establishing a new norm. So, with the help of pro-social managers, employees can make necessary adjustments to new working environment.

Thanks for reading - your comments and feedback are greatly welcomed. We are happy to collaborate too.

* Prosocial behavior within an organisation can be compared to organisational citizenship behaviour, which is defined as an employee voluntary commitment to the tasks that are not a part of their contractual responsibilities. The important distinction between the two is that prosocial behavior, unlike organisational citizenship behaviour, can be unrelated to the organization itself - employee could be helping a coworker with a personal matter.

References

Bartel, C. A., Wrzesniewski, A., & Wiesenfeld, B. M. (2012). Knowing where you stand: Physical isolation, perceived respect, and organizational identification among virtual employees. Organization Science, 23(3), 743-757.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological bulletin, 117(3), 497.

Beauregard, T. A., Basile, K. A., & Canónico, E. (2019). Telework: Outcomes and facilitators for employees. In R. N. Landers (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of technology and employee behavior (pp. 511-543). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cacioppo, J., T., Patrick, B. (2008), Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, Norton, New York.

De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T., & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134-1150.

Delizonna, L. (2017). High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create It. Harvard Business Review, 8, 1-5.

Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., & Vlaev, I. (2010). MINDSPACE: influencing behaviour for public policy. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277.

Edmondson, A. C. (2002). Managing the risk of learning: Psychological safety in work teams (pp. 255-275). Cambridge, MA: Division of Research, Harvard Business School.

Fehr, E., & Schurtenberger, I. (2018). Normative foundations of human cooperation. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 458-468. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0385-5

Forsyth, D.R. (2010). Components of cohesion. Group Dynamics, 5th Edition. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. p. 118–122.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). “The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 359 (1449): 1367–1378.

Gallo, A. (2020). What Your Coworkers Need Right Now Is Compassion. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-your-coworkers-need-right-now-is-compassion

Gallup, 2018. What does agility mean for business leaders? The Real Future of Work: Agility Issue.

Grant, A. M. (2008). Does intrinsic motivation fuel the prosocial fire? Motivational synergy in predicting persistence, performance, and productivity. Journal of applied psychology, 93(1), 48. 

Martin, S., & Marks, J. (2019). Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don't, and Why. Random House.

Morgan, S. J., & Symon, G. (2002). Computer-mediated communication and remote management: integration or isolation? Social Science Computer Review, 20(3), 302-311.

Orlitzky M, Siegel DS and Waldman DA. (2011) Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability. Business & Society 50: 6-27.

Rozovsky, J. (2015). The five keys to a successful Google team. Retrieved from https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447-1451.