The Importance of Knowing Each Other… Social Connection and Performance

The Importance of Knowing Each Other… Social Connection and Performance

Specific studies have found a positive correlation between social cohesion and sporting performance (Eys & Kim 2017). While all research is subject to limitations, there is a direction of travel; teams with high social cohesion (and task cohesion) outperform those lower in both constructs. This finding has been replicated across other domains, such as IT teams and call centres (Heffernan 2015, Huckman et al 2012).

Social cohesion is built through time spent together and is effective by allowing people to develop a sense of trust and belonging to the broader group. Trust is essential for relationships to function. Trust is the basis for understanding if team members do what they say they will do and commit to the team’s purpose with maximum effort. It also allows for a sense of reciprocity and shared norms of behaviour, which is essential for the tacit working of any group. This is because teams high in trust require fewer formal processes, member checking, and policy documentation/codes of conduct to function effectively.

Zak (2017) notes the specific benefits of high-trust organisations; people in high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout. In these teams’ people are more likely to put in discretionary effort and less likely to leave (https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust).

Authors Camilleri, Rockey, Dunbar (2023) referred to the concept of psychological closeness:

“Psychological closeness is what allows us to appreciate how someone else thinks, how they are likely to react in a given situation, to elicit their support, how best to handle them when there is a difficult decision to be made and how to approach them with bad news, it also determines our willingness to act altruistically towards them."

This develops a common frame of reference, allowing what Hackman (2002) called a “shared mental model of the performance situation”. Moreover, this closeness allows high-performing teams to improve performance through the critical aspect of giving feedback. In their survey of high-performing people, Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry (2015) note that their capacity to take feedback differentiated the top 10% of performers.

Trust-based relationships are necessary for this feedback to be well received and acted on. Given the rate of improvement needed and the high-emotion setting feedback is often given in, trust is essential for individual and team performance. Organisations need high-trust relationships to learn and develop faster than competitors.

When considering how to build high trust within the organisation, evidence suggests the need for high levels of interaction (time together) and the setting to be one where social bonds are developed (Waber 2013). Heffernan (2015) notes that the time and space given for a large amount of interaction on non-work related matters is critical to gaining high levels of trust within a group. We form social bonds through shared activities and experiences, including “eating and drinking together, laughing, storytelling and reminiscing” (Camilleri, Rockey, Dunbar 2023). Stable, frequent interactions with others develop trust, and Hall (2018) notes that the frequency of contact accurately predicts levels of trust.

Waber (2013) further notes that this trust comes “directly from the structure of interactions in these networks”. Pentland (2015) also notes, “direct, strong, positive interactions between people is vital to promoting trustworthy, cooperative behaviour”. In a similar finding to Hall (2018), Waber (2013) found that the number of times people had direct interactions with each other gave a “surprisingly accurate prediction of the trust they expressed in each other”. The work of MIT’s collective intelligence project -detailed in Pentlands work Honest Signals (2014)- further confirms the above; time together and high levels of interaction drive high trust relationships.

The second factor is the setting and signalling that encourages trust to form. Camilleri et al (2023) note that leaders in team settings underestimate bonding as it happens below conscious awareness. When considering the practical challenge of creating the necessary trust, evidence suggests that “environmental signalling” is essential for these states to occur. People must be signalled that this is a safe, social environment where informal conversation, storytelling and bonding are valued and expected.

This psychological closeness develops group-specific communication (Waber 2013).   How well teams communicate is central to their capacity to compete effectively. The advantage of socially cohesive teams is that they develop group-specific language and communication processes that create feelings of belonging and aid learning. The quote below illustrates this:

“Digging into this further, cohesive groups don't just have psychological and trust benefits; there is also a significant impact on communication effectiveness. As people in a cohesive network spend more and more time with each other, they also start to share communication shortcuts. In effect, they're developing their own language. This is not a language in a formal sense but one in which people share common assumptions and are familiar with the same concepts. Verbal codes develop in durable networks within organisations like thick undergrowth impenetrable to outsiders but home territory to members. Like legal or academic, medical jargon, these vocabularies exclude outsiders, binding insiders together and making conversations more efficient” (Waber 2013).

What this communication process gives people is a sense of belonging and what Cohen & Prusak (2001) notes as “membership”; it is “coming to know what the group knows, sharing the skills, practices, knowledge, language, and stories of the group”. Eastwood (2020) notes that this sense of belonging (a function of high trust) is essential to team performance in his work with high-performing organisations.

This trust and insider communication is said to teach the “ground truth” of an organisation. A term coined by the US Army, it “refers to the complex reality of authentic experience as opposed to generalities” (Cohen & Prusak 2011). This tacit understanding and knowledge sharing improves any given player/employee’s experience and, thus, performance. This communication and understanding leads to a central tenant of the cohesion equals performance hypothesis. Once trust and communication patterns are shaped and guided, this capacity to generate ideas, solutions and plans is a critical competitive advantage.

As Pentland (2015) notes from his “sociometric data" and various high stakes/high-performance settings such as hospitals and investment firms, “those patterns of interaction were as important as everything else (individual intelligence, skill, personality, the contents of discussion) combined. What happened between people in casual conversations, brief exchanges…..made a measurable difference in productivity”. In Bank of America, colleagues breaking at the same time to develop social capital added $15 Million to the bottom line (Heffernan 2015).

This group problem-solving ability -which is greater than any individual ability- emerges from connections between people. The number of opportunities for social learning, usually through informal face-to-face interactions among peer employees, is the single largest factor in company productivity. Because of this “relationship between opportunities for social learning and productivity, simple tricks to improve social learning can have enormous payoffs” (Waber 2013).

This finding led Pentland (2015) to state that the primary responsibility of leadership is to shape interaction patterns: "Think about your job as improving idea flow, getting everyone talking to each other and connections between groups, this can be very effective in improving performance”. Additionally, this process allows status differences within the group to be evened out (Storr 2022, Edumnson 2018). All these aspects are essential for a group to perform, and the lack of psychological safety and status barriers are well-documented issues that have preceded organisational failures in the areas such as air travel and shipping (Marquee 2020).

Moreover, higher levels of social cohesion lead to more friendships forming, which further contributes to higher levels of performance and subjective well-being (Camilleri et al 2023). In terms of performance, Gallup asked, "Do you have a friend at work?" in their 12-question survey, as they found -over thousands of data points- this question had a strong correlation to productivity and lower levels of absence and lower overall turnover. (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx). Jehan and Saha (1997) noted that “close friendships increase workplace productivity”, this is because “friends are more committed, communicate better, and encourage each other”. Camilleri et al. (2023) note that friendship should be considered so central to performance and well-being that it needs to be considered an “intentional part of the design” of organisations.

From a well-being perspective, having good friends -including at work- is the most significant predictor of health, greater than diet and smoking (Camilleri et al 2023). Further evidence for this is noted in the Harvard Adult Development Study, the longest study ever conducted on well-being, which shows friendship and strong relationships (noting specifically social bonding time) were the number one factor in subjective well-being (Waldinger & Schultz 2022). Data from the Google project ‘Mappiness’ notes that interpersonal connections were the central factor in improving life satisfaction (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2023). The way most research suggests friendships at work are built is -as noted above- lots of face-to-face interaction, ideally in non-work or relaxed settings. Hall (2018) estimates it takes “around 200 hours of face-to-face interaction over a short period to turn a stranger into a good friend”. He further notes that work hours do not count as much; "hanging out socially" is what matters for bonds to develop.

Further, friendship is hypothesised to contribute to low organisational turnover (Gallup 2022). The long tenure of players and staff leads to high levels of structural cohesion, which provides additional competitive advantage through their levels of task cohesion and shared understanding (Hackman 2002). High levels of social cohesion are a potentially vital predecessor to task cohesion. That is, if we want players and staff to stay for long periods of time, trusted friendships and high subjective well-being are vital parts of achieving that. An  Oxford Said Business School study (2019) noted interpersonal relationships ranked number one (in a list of twelve and just above pay and work being interesting) as central to employee satisfaction (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324830283_Work_and_Well-being_A_Global_Perspective). A Further Oxford (2023) study found that happy employees were 13% more productive.  

(https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wellbeing2/documents/media/2304_wp_workplace_wellbeing_and_firm_performance_doi.pdf)

Research by Hackman (2002) and Groysberg (2010) has shown in multiple studies, including research into NASA, The National Transportation Safety Board and investment banks, that teams with high stability levels over time outperform those who don't. Specifically, Hackman (2002) details six factors -directly taken from NASA research- as to why stability matters;

1. Groups have a pre-established level of familiarity.
2. They develop a shared mental model of the performance situation.
3. They develop transactive memory.
4. They understand who is good at what.
5. They understand who is bad a what.
6. They show high levels of discretionary effort.

Groyesberg (2010), whose research was on the portability of talent, notes that structural cohesion allows certain people to become "stars". His findings are that when this talent moves, it can take as long as five years to return to previous performance and most never return to previous levels of performance; the networks they were embedded in allowed them to flourish..

The final aspect of how cohesion aids performance is point six of Hackman’s (2002) description of high-performing teams: the high levels of effort put in. Various scholars have looked at this aspect; in the literature, it is often given different names, organisational citizenship behaviour, and extra discretionary effort (Podsakoff, P, MacKenzie, S.  Paine, JB & Bachrach, D (2000). Colloquially, it is known as going the extra mile. This is perhaps the lifeblood of sustaining competitive advantage: people motivated and driven to do over and above for themselves, their teammates, and the organisation. This paper contends that high discretionary effort (and thus competitive advantage) is best found through the above mentioned steps.

Overall, social cohesion has been proven to improve performance. To achieve this, Leadership needs to create the space and time for people to develop high trust levels. The set and setting must allow this to be possible (as much is subconscious), and Leadership must allocate time and resources to shaping and guiding this interaction. This allows for psychological safety and closeness to be built. This then allows for highly efficient levels of communication to develop. This enables learning, development and problem-solving to happen at a faster rate than competitors. A further focus on friendship accelerates this process and provides the most robust foundation for subjective well-being. This, in turn, creates low levels of turnover, thus generating shared experience and understanding over time, leading to over and above effort, which is a significant competitive advantage. Pfeffer (1999) notes that for anything to truly be a competitive advantage, it must exist “within and between the people” and “take time”.  

References:

Camilleri, T. Rockey, S & Dunber, R. (2023). The Social Brain, The Psychology of Successful Groups. Cornerstone Press. Oxford.

Cohen, D. & Prussak, L. (2001) In Good Company, How Social Capital Makes Organisations Work. Harvard Business School Press. USA.

Eastwood, O. (2022) Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness. Quercus Publishing, NZ.  

Edmondson, A.C (2018) The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth. John Wiley & Sons Inc. USA.

Eys,M. & Kim, J (2017) https://oxfordre.com/psychology/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.001.0001/acrefore-9780190236557-e-186

Groysberg, B (2010) Chasing Stars, The Myth of Talent and The Portability of Performance. Princton University Press. USA.

Hackman, R. (2002) Leading Teams, Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press. USA.

Hall, J,A. (2018) How Many Hours Does it Take to Make a Friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Vol 36, 4.

Heffernan, M (2015). Beyond Measure. TED Simon and Schuster UK.

Huckman, R. Staats, B & Upton, D (2009) Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services. Management Science. Vol 55. 1. 85-100

Marquee, D, (2019) Leadership is Language, The Hidden Power of What you Say and What you Don’t. Penguin UK.

Pentland, A (2010) Honest Signals, Penguin, London.

Pentland, A (2015). Social Physics, How Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Penguin, London.

Pfeffer, J. (1999) The Knowing-Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Harvard Business Review Press.

Podsakoff, P.  Ahearne, M & MacKenzie, S.  (1997) “Organizational Citizenship Behaviour and the Quantity and Quality of Work Group Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology 82 (1997): 262–70;

Podsakoff, P, MacKenzie, S.  Paine, JB & Bachrach, D (2000) Organisational Citizenship Behaviours: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research,” Journal of Management 26 (2000): 513–63.

Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2023). Don’t Trust Your Gut. Using Data Instead of Instinct To Make Better Choices. Bloomsbury Publishing. London.

Storr, W (2022) Status Games: On Human Life and How to Play it. HarperCollins, UK.

Waber, B (2013). People Analytics, How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us About The Future of Work. Person Education FT Press. USA.

Waldinger, R. & Schultz, M (2022) The Good Life and How to Live it: Leasson from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness. Penguin. UK.

Weisinger, H. & Pawliw-Fry, J.P. (2015). How To Perform Under Pressure. Hodder and Stoughton. London.

Web References:

Zak, (2017) (https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324830283_Work_and_Well-being_A_Global_Perspective

https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wellbeing2/documents/media/2304_wp_workplace_wellbeing_and_firm_performance_doi.pdf

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx

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