Teams Who Share Personal Stories Are More Effective; Harvard Business Review, 4/25/16

Francesca Gino, Harvard Business Review; Teams Who Share Personal Stories Are More Effective:

"...[I]ndividual team members’ need for social acceptance may hinder the team’s ability to share and integrate information they need to accomplish their tasks.

One remedy is for team members to devote some time to highlighting their different ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives. Robin Ely of Harvard Business School and David Thomas, the current dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, found in a qualitative study of diverse teams that openly discussing the unique qualities of different team members and integrating diverse perspectives allowed individuals to feel valued and respected. The team members were able to apply their unique knowledge, perspectives, and identities to the task at hand, which enhanced their cross-cultural learning and performance.

One psychological process that can heighten individual team members’ contributions and the team’s outcomes is relational self-affirmation, I recently found in my research with Julia Lee of the University of Michigan, Dan Cable of the London Business School, and Brad Staats of the University of Carolina in Chapel Hill. Relational self-affirmation involves asking individuals from a team member’s preexisting personal network (friends, family, and coworkers) to write narratives about times the individual made a distinct contribution...

Thanks to the various strengths they bring to the table, teams have the potential to outperform individuals yet often fail to capitalize on this potential. Finding ways to let team members know about how their behavior positively affected others in the past can offset concerns about social acceptance that come with exposing one’s unique perspectives and identity to others."