Power, safety, and uninhibited cognition

Last week, Adrian discussed Edmondson’s (1999) ideas that a shared sense of team psychological safety leads to improved performance through enhanced learning and communication. When team members realize that they can share potentially ill-conceived ideas freely without the fear of sanctions, ideas of all qualities can flow more freely. This cognitive freedom to share contributes to increasing the overall flow of ideas. A high flow of ideas improves inter-team learning and consequently, overall team performance.

Power, as we learned from Keltner (2003), can also lower individuals’ cognitive inhibitions. Individuals with power have the ability to promote their ideas and those that emerge from their environment, and to influence the behavior of others. Accordingly, the empowered have the ability to vet and endorse ideas, and direct action accordingly.

These two different modes of achieving freer cognition are not mutually exclusive. The powerful individuals in a team may set the tone for accepting ideas in their team and accept ideas from all team members. Depending on the leadership’s persuasion towards wide-ranging ideas, they have the ability to set the stage for psychological safety in the group.

Interdepartmental collaboration will affect power and psychological safety dynamics, and consequently the level of uninhibited idea exchange. Each pre-existing team will have an established mode of sharing ideas and implementing ideas. The shift to collaboration will require new rules of engagement.

For the following hypotheses we suggest that Team A and Team B collaborate in the form of Collaboration C:

H1: When Team A has a higher established level of psychological safety and higher relative power (in the organization) compared to Team B, Team A members will provide more ideas in Collaboration C.

H2: When Team A has higher power (in the organization) than Team B, and Team B has more psychological safety than Team A, Team B will contribute few ideas in Collaboration C than Team A.

In the case of the UVa health system where collaboration is falling short of hoped for efficacy, discerning what inhibits idea sharing in terms of safety and power will offer insights towards improving performance. We could conduct structured interviews with individuals in context of their primary team functions and their collaborative functions. Coding for inhibited idea-sharing and the quality of ideas actioned would reveal the differences in both situations. We would also survey the participants to rate team power relative to the organization.

Psychological Safety in Work Teams: Is it Group Trust?

 

In her 1999 article, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Amy Edmonson introduces the construct of team psychological safety, which she defines as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”  She defines interpersonal risk-taking as, “a sense of confidence that others will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”  What differs psychological safety from trust, as it is defined in the literature, is that the former is an inter-group phenomenon, and the latter is (in the literature) interpersonal.   But the definitions and mechanisms described are quite similar. 

 

Rousseau et al. (1998) argue most scholars can agree on a fundamental definition of trust. They noted that "confident expectations" and a "willingness to be vulnerable" are critical components of most definitions of trust (Morrow, Hansen, Pearson, 2004). Consistent with this view, Morrow, Hansen, Pearson (2004) defined trust as the extent to which one believes that others will not act to exploit one's vulnerabilities (Barney and Hansen, 1994; Mayer et al., 1995; McAllister, 1995). 

 

McAllister (1995), for example, explores the nature and functioning of relationships of interpersonal trust among managers and professionals in organizations, the factors influencing trust's development, and shows a positive effect on performance when trust was present in these relationships in an empirical study.  Building on that and other research, Morrow, Hansen, Pearson (2004) argue that trust evolves from a pattern of careful, rational thinking (cognitive-based), coupled with an examination of one's feelings, instincts and intuition (affect-based). 

 

Similarly, Edmonson (1999) writes that a group “will conclude that making a mistake does not lead to rejection when they have had a team experience in which appreciation and interest are expressed in response to discussion of their own and others’ mistakes.” Such shared experiences, occurring over time, create the tacit belief that that the team is a psychologically safe place. The phenomenon Edmonson (1999) describes as psychological safety could arguably be called “group trust,” which would be a development in the trust literature, but it may also be more than that. 

 

Edmonson (1999) observes that psychological safety leads to improved performance through enhanced learning, not necessarily through the combination of individual trust and/or affect.  In her research, learning behavior mediates between team psychological safety and team performance.

 

Her results support an integrative perspective in which context support/team leader coaching and shared beliefs together shape team performance outcomes.  As the group feels more confident to share information, more information is exchanged and therefore all collective information is more likely to be shared.

 

Edmonson (1999) Psychological Safety Model:

Cognitive reminders to encourage sharing context/coaching ->  Multiple experiences of sharing without consequence -> Psychological safety -> Willingness to share -> Inter-group learning -> Improved performance

 

Trust literatures generally describe the benefits of cognitive trust as increased voluntary collaboration and affective trust as increased information sharing (McAllister,1995). (Note also that trust in economics literatures has also been found through empirical studies to reduce transaction costs by avoiding costly negotiations and contracting (Dyer, 1997; Sako, 1992)).

 

McAllister (1995), Morrow, Hansen, Pearson (2004) Trust Model:

Interactions and cues with other agent provide data, which are processed and the output is:

 

1) Careful, rational thought about the competence of the other and structures in place to protect the self-> Cognitive-based trust -> Trust the evaluated person and actively engage in collaborative work and seek knowledge from him/her

 

2) An examination of one's feelings, instincts and intuitions about the interactions -> Affect-based trust -> Open sharing of sensitive personal information, knowledge sharing, idea sharing

 

Edmonson’s psychological safety model, it could be argued, describes a method for the creation of affective trust, which therefore encourages information sharing, which then leads to increased group performance.  Through that analogy, one may argue that missing from her model is the cognitive-based trust mechanisms.  However, this may be a feature of interpersonal trust which is not able to be generalized when moving from micro to meso trust.  It would be interesting to observe groups that employ psychological safety pre and post employment.  Will there be increases in levels of cognitive trust, which would manifest itself in increased collaboration, in addition to the increased information sharing?

 

Based on Edmonson’s work, the UVAHS could benefit from employing psychological safety into its groups.  We would like to propose a grounded study in which we and observe and report on current group interaction, introduce Edmonson’s psychological safety methods, and observe to see if improvements occur and (if they do) whether the improvements come from increased learning through affect, and if we are able to observe any improvements in cognitive trust as well.  If we observe measures of both cognitive and affective in a collective “group trust” we may bring the field one step closer to solving the mystery of local versus generalized trust as posed by Kramer and Cook (2004) – why do people generally trust their doctor, but not doctors in general?  Or, in the context of one of the health system’s problems, “Why do doctors trust their department, but not the health system in general?”

Adversity and Collaboration

Teams that organize to realize certain objective are often faced with unforeseen obstacles, constraints and roadblocks. These obstacles can be viewed as a form of adversity, and may create a watershed moment where a team decides to forge ahead or abandon existing efforts. When teams experience adverse conditions, what makes some teams galvanize together to overcome and persevere and others, to diminish and fall short of its objectives? Said differently, what role can adversity play in promoting or diminishing collaboration?

Latene, Eckman and Joy (1996) found that participants who experienced adverse conditions together (in the form of electric shock) tended to demonstrate greater interpersonal affect one with another than the control group that did not experience the treatments. Elder and Clipp (1988) studied military combat units and found that extreme adversity, losing friends during combat, prolonged personal ties some 40 years later. Casciaro and Lobo (2008) demonstrated a relationship between interpersonal affect and work partner exchange. From these findings, one may conclude that under certain conditions, adversity may lead to greater interpersonal affect and thus greater team member exchange.

In past literature, we have discussed how collective identity can promote collaboration. In fact some researchers (Parsons) have defined collaboration as “identification” and “coordination.” We believe that is the strength of collective identity that creates the conditions by which adversity can have a magnifying effect on collaboration. We assert that adversity will moderate the influence of identity. In others words, depending on the strength of the group identity, adversity will either decrease or increase collaboration.

H:1a
When collective identity is strong, adversity will enhance collaboration.

H:2
When collective identity is weak, adversity will diminish collaboration.


Methods:

Experiment I
In this study, we would evaluate collaboration, as measured by co-authored publications, among cohorts from various PhD programs. More specifically, we would compare paper output from programs with varying degrees of adversity. For example, the Wharton Economics PhD program has a higher than usual wash-out rate where two out of three students are expelled from the program before completion. We would employ a mechanism to measure collective identity among cohorts, moderate for wash out rate and compare co-authored publications among the same cohort.

Experiment II
We would employ the same mechanism to measure collective identity of surgery units within the Health System. Next, we collect patient casualty rates and evaluate this data as a moderating affect to see if collaboration improves over time. If a team has a strong collective identity, and higher than usual casualty rates, because of the predicted effect of adversity on collaboration, we would expect rates to improve. If a surgery unit has a relatively weak collective identity and higher causality rates, we expect casualty rates to remain the same or deteriorate. In this experiment would need to control for groups that do not experience high levels of adversity.

The Effects of Beneficiary Exposure on Interdepartmental Collaboration

Grant, Campbell, Chen, Cottone, Lapedis, and Lee (2007) showed that employees are willing to maintain their motivation when their work is relationally designed to provide opportunities for respectful contact with the beneficiaries of their efforts.

Our hypothesis is: Interdepartmental groups will more effectively collaborate when they are exposed to common beneficiaries.

If confirmed, our hypothesis could be an important development for Grant etal.’s research and contribute to the literature. Many industries in which there is high specialization in departments and for which client contact is not necessarily the norm may see an increase in collaboration. (Some examples include: investment banks; hospitals/healthcare clinics; and hotels/restaurants).

We think this could be especially relevant in the Health System (both the effect of the beneficiary contact and the import of the research) given human lives are the beneficiaries. Grant etal. (2007) showed this through their confirmation of Hypothesis 3: We predicted that task significance moderates the effect of contact with beneficiaries on persistence. When individuals are working on significant, high-impact tasks, they are aware that their efforts have the potential to benefit or harm other people. Accordingly, they are likely to invest additional time and energy in their efforts in order to benefit these people.

Data collection A, Positive/Reflexive (TBD): Ryan mentioned research showed that groups in which all departments were exposed to clients showed more willingness to collaborate interdepartmentally than when all departments had not been exposed to clients. This data will be looked at more carefully.

Data collection B, Reflexive: Andrew’s research with the Batten Institute contains data from at least one of the entrepreneurs studied that he was able to successfully improve interdepartmental performance by sharing feedback from a disappointed customer. The customer had ordered M&M’s with a personal message for a son’s birthday, and the order had arrived a day late. The mother expressed how upset her son was that his birthday was negatively effected by the tardy delivery. The entrepreneur then realized that his company did not merely manufacture personalized M&M’s, but something more important- happiness. He shared the story of this mother and her son with employees, and performance improved. This indicates there is probably value in looking back at the Batten data to see if other analogous stories are already collected. At the very least it indicates the potential to reexamine this entrepreneur’s organization and perhaps to interview other employees to see if they felt that the beneficiary exposure helped collaboration.

Data collection C, Positive: In order to test the hypothesis using positive methods, we ideally would propose recreating the experiment used to test Hypothesis 3 in Grant etal (2007) with a shift in emphasis from individual performance to group performance. Given the complexity of that experiment, however, perhaps we could use the Health System as research subjects and collect enough data to draw conclusions. We propose arranging meetings for representatives from all the relevant departments (to be determined when we have the full scope of the UVAHS organization) with patients. (Through prior healthcare experience, the allocation of patients to non-physician and nurse employees is through alphabetical assignment). It may be unethical to use a control group which is not exposed to patients. Thus, we hope to be able to get a sense of the control through interviews with managers who will be able to evaluate pre and post performance. (Generally healthcare facilities track data closely, and we may already have the control group benchmarks established, again this will be established when we have more of the data for the project).

If proven correct, one way to improve interdepartmental collaboration in the UVA Health System will be to expose representatives from each department to specific medical cases going forward.

How can the study of cognition – specifically integrative complexity – affect our understanding of effective interdepartmental collaboration?

When Individuals need to collaborate across departmental lines to achieve otherwise unattainable goals, the collaborators have the incentive to be receptive to the needs of all involved. That receptivity is higher in those who are integratively complex. Until recently, the literature generally agreed that a person’s ability to make informed decisions based on assimilating a broad range of (or complex) perspectives led to better outcomes than in situations relying on a narrow (or simple) perspective.

Tetlock, Peterson, & Berry (1993) delved into the dichotomous nature of integratively complex & simple dispositions that people have. They linked weaknesses underlying the positive attributes that being complex often conveys.

For example, integratively complex individuals tend to be excessively receptive to competing points of view which often leads to being unable to make decisions. The corollary is that these individuals exhibit disagreeableness. This singular fact has ramifications on the success of collaborations. Disagreeableness can undermine a collaboration’s success.

The question we would like to explore is whether the disagreeableness that lurks behind integratively complex dispositions impedes collaborations’ performance. With Weick’s advice in mind, academic research provides a microcosm to investigate the complexity and disagreeableness in a collaborative setting. The nature of academic research – particularly in social sciences – with its overarching complexity requires that researchers have the ability to assimilate, evaluate, and integrate broad views on many phenomena. Simultaneously, academics have a long history of collaborating when creating new knowledge, which is exemplified by researchers sharing authorship on published papers. Disagreeableness has the propensity to undermine collaboration and the combinatorial power of integratively complex approach to generating new knowledge.

Therefore we posit that:
H1 – Published social scientists demonstrate integratively complex cognitive abilities.
H2 – Social scientists whose disagreeableness overpowers the benefits of collaboration (i.e. authors papers alone) will publish papers cited less frequently than those who can collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

Methods:
Mining Google scholar and EBSCOhost:
We would select a set of social science journals to form our core data set.

To address H1:
From that set we would look at the reference sections and gauge the level of interdisciplinary works drawn upon to establish the author(s) level of integrative complexity. We could build a index from the number of citations in the paper and their distance from the journal topic. That would establish whether researchers are complex or not.

To address H2:
We would collect the number of authors per paper and interdiscplinary range over a given period in a select set of social science journals. We would then compare the number of authors of each paper to the number of subsequent citations for each paper to gauge its comparative success.

Emotion
This week’s readings elucidate how affect contributes to the organizing process. From Sigal, we learn that individual affect can influence collective affect and promote improved collaboration and perceived task performance. This research was performed at the individual level and measures were taken to ensure that the confederate was not perceived as a leader. Due to power, distance and formal authority, leaders are uniquely positioned to have more influence on a team than any one member.

Hypothesis 1
Leadership affect will moderate interdepartmental collaboration, measured by identification and coordination, more so than a non-leader’s affect.

Worline et al. and Martin introduce the concept of affect as a dominant organizing principle. While affect was integral to both organizations, the degree of authentic affect seemed to differentiate the two. This led us to consider the relationship between affect authenticity and impact on collaboration. If as some studies have show, disingenuous affect can be discerned, it may be less likely to promote collaboration than authentic affect.

Hypothesis 2
Authentic leadership affect will moderate interdepartmental collaboration, measured by identification and coordination, more so than perceived disingenuous leadership affect.

Methods
For the first hypothesis, we would employ a similar methodology as Sigal and utilize actors to measure individual affect. We would modify the study by introducing the leadership variable. In one of the studies, we would designate a formal leader and compare her affect influence to that of the individual confederate’s.
In the second study, we would deploy a survey immediately following a leader’s presentation around a critical change initiative (We would need to select situations that are emotionally charged). After the meeting we would ask questions around two dimensions. (1)How authentic was the leader’s affect and (2) how likely are you to collaborate to achieve the advocated change. We would then measure the correlation.

The Effects of High Cognitive Uncertainty on Effective Collaboration in a Post Merger Setting

In, “A distributed cognition perspective on newcomers' change processes: The management of cognitive uncertainty in two investment banks,” A. Alexandra Michel shows that in an investment banking setting, a bank which amplified cognitive uncertainty created a collective-centric organization. As she writes, “because demands exceeded individuals’ cognitive capacity, bankers used organizational resources to solve problems inductively.” Based on her conclusions, the implicit assumption is that when cognitive uncertainty is intermittent, or absent, organizations will tend to be less group-oriented in their approach to problem solving, more individualistic, and, logically, less effective at collaboration. Groups with high cognitive uncertainty problem solve inductively and will harness resources across the group more effectively.

Another implicit claim is that if cognitive uncertainty is high enough, and participants feel that solving problems is outside the realm of their own skill set, they are less likely to satisfice, and more likely to collaborate to solve problems, and therefore more likely to have better decision outcomes. Similarly, high levels of cognitive uncertainty imply low levels of taxonomic classification and, presumably, diverse member skillsets are more highly leveraged – the point of view of another member is more valued than it would be otherwise.

In other words, groups with low levels of cognitive uncertainty close off potential outcomes. As Frank Knight writes, “Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all." If the future is completely unpredictable, as Knight would argue, cognitive certainty is an artifice that ignorantly presume omniscient knowledge on the part of the manager (or organization). Any attempt to reduce cognitive uncertainty, in Knightean terms, implies the ability to predict the future. The optimal solution may be unintentionally closed off, or muted by the restriction of options.

Our question in this installment of the post merger integration blog is what about the case in which two organizations have merged together? This case adds some complexities that Michel’s does not possess. Knight would argue that it doesn’t matter. Any attempt by a leader to control the group norms would result in the reduction of potential value of the group. In effect, through directing, a manager would reduce organizing, and potentially limit or interfere with sensemaking.

One hypothetical situation is that when two cultures come together, the groups may come into a new situation with bounded senses of cognitive uncertainty to a certain degree. While they may not know what the new group norms are, they know what the norms from their legacy institutions were. Ironically, in this case, high levels of cognitive uncertainty from a legacy organization could become a norm. If I expect high levels of uncertainty in the newly formed organization, I am clinging to a norm, and thereby my cognitive uncertainty which was high in the old organization is lowered in the new one. Another practical complication is that without some cognitive certainties, a group formed by two organizations may never integrate. That is to say, if it isn’t forced on the members, they may not ever feel the need to do it.

This could imply that in a post merger setting some of what researchers argued that organizations should reduce cognitive uncertainty to compensate for bounded rationality (March and Simon, 1958) may apply. In other words, unless I tell the groups they have to integrate they may never do it (at the worst) and potentially will waste time while integrating (at the best). The research we have seen in ingroup/outgroup psychology could support this hypothesis through the fact that a merger creates groups that may have not been present pre merger through the creation of “legacy x” and “legaxy y” identities. For example, when two companies that operated with high degrees of uncertainty pre-merger (and presumably have low levels of “within group similarity of attitudes, understanding, and language” (Weick and Roberts, 1993: 358) the legacy orientation creates group identities that may need to be broken down externally by managers to re-establish high levels of cognitive uncertainty.

We are interested in testing Michel’s thesis in a post merger environment. Our experiment will be to take two highly functioning teams prescreened as operating with high levels of cognitive uncertainty. (In some ways this could be simply a newly formed group). The premise of the experiment would be to have the groups complete a game separately and then split the groups in half and create merged groups of equal representation in terms of numbers and ability from each legacy group to repeat the same game. We would tell one group that they have to collaborate with members from both legacy groups as well as tell them who from the previous round performed best on the task and which team scored higher than the other. We would tell the other merged group nothing and observe both groups as they complete the same game for the second time. (A repeated game would simulate Michel’s pitch process in that it is a highly repeated activity in which performance can be improved upon with collaboration. Disclosing scores would simulate the “star culture” she outlines in the case of Red Bank).

Our hypothesis is that the unprimed (i.e. group with the highest degree of cognitive uncertainty) will perform better on the repeated game than that which was given some reductions in cognitive uncertainty. Our theory is that best practices and individual performances which were present pre-merger will still be present post-merger, but that highlighting them in one group will stifle lessons learned from the previous iteration and the emergence of new talents which were not present in the first iteration. This structure could be repeated with numerous groups to generate statistically relevant data, using scores on the game as a proxy for performance. Or we could approach ethnographically, and observe a smaller number of groups, thereby yielding comparative data to that of Michel’s. Both methods have merit in their ability to test this theory.