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.
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I really like how you set up your argument here. Your narrative is beautifully written and follows a strong logic. I'm a little puzzled about the hypothesis, though. You say adversity moderates identification and imply some sort of trade-off between the two, whereas your introduction seems to suggest an augmenting effect.
ReplyDeleteOne more thing - I think the author you are looking for in your cite is Parsons?
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree with Megan about the puzzling hypothesis. What you've said about collaboration doesn't follow from the Elder & Clipp (1988) finding. They found that adversity strengthens bonds. So your hypothesis that:
ReplyDeleteadversity will moderate the influence of collective identity on collaboration
maybe isn't as clear as it should be.
The way I read your proposed study, it seems to suggest that adversity, perhaps (although even this is debatable if we look at the Elder & Clipp (1988) finding)) influences collective identity. But the question of whether there are moderating factors for the influence of collective identity on collaboration is a separate, and important question.
As things stand, it seems that groups with a stronger collective identity will collaborate more effectively, but you all seem to have proposed that the thing that influences levels of collective identity (adversity) can ALSO moderate the effect of collective identity on collaboration. I'm not sure how that makes sense to make it a moderator if all adversity does is to adjust levels of collective identity. (The main effect is still for collective identity.) If that's all there is to it, we can't call adversity a moderator because a moderator is something that affects the strength or direction of the relation between IVs and DVs. Adversity in this case would simply be a manipulation of the IV. Correct?
So what would make this better?
I think that if you could show that levels of collective identity DON'T change under adversity but collaboration increases, all else being equal, that would make adversity a moderator. (It would be an uninteresting find, of course, to learn that adversity was a moderator but that it made collaboration more difficult.)
Let me know if I interpreted this poorly or misinterpreted the hypothesis entirely!
Not sure how you are defining adversity and what you consider an adverse event? For example, is the wash out rate the adverse event in experiment 1? Is the casualty rate for the patients or the health care workers in the health system experiment? What is a "casualty rate" and why is it considered an adverse event? Also, there can be other moderating variables why cohorts do not coauthor papers together, such as differing research interests, etc. How are these type of variables controlled?
ReplyDeleteMegan and Jesse,
ReplyDeleteI modified the hypothese...hope that this clarifies.
Muchas gracias Bret! H1 & H2 are much clearer.
ReplyDeleteIs that true about the wash out rates in the Wharton econ area? Yikes.
Now the way the hypotheses are framed, you're right, you'd need control groups (which would be difficult). In my opinion something like a pretest/posttest would be more appropriate. Be sure to measure collective identity before AND after the adversity manipulation of course (to rule out the notion that collective identity simply changed).
I think H2 now is especially interesting given a few old chestnuts in social psychology. For example, external threat is notorious for increasing collective identity. (Think the US after 9/11.) But at the same time, collaboration didn't necessarily improve. But groupthink, deference to leadership (as measured by presidential approval ratings), and ingroup appeasement (measured by the nearly unquestioned passing of the Patriot Act) all went through the roof.
So this gets to Kelly's point: what is the nature of our adversity manipulation?
I know with some of the organizations I've been in, adversity can come from within (when someone defects, when someone isn't doing their job etc.), it can be the result of something systematic (bureaucracy, hierarchy, a merger), it can be a fluke of nature (a bus accident floods the ER with patients at UVA Health System), or of course it can come from the outside (as in 9/11).
They (the Health System) say they have tons of data. It might be worth looking for data that account for or explain these varying types of adversity too.
I would like know more about how collective identity is measured/interacts with adversity and collaboration in your experiments. I don't think many phD cohorts would be very collectivistic. I think you've described adversity fine, but how would you find collectivistic vs. individualistic groups to sample?
ReplyDeleteI’m not sure if a looming threat of being expelled from a phd program is the greatest method to test group adversity enhancing collaboration. I think of adversity as a group of people coming together to weather a certain kind of storm, and becoming stronger as a result of effectively dealing with it. Does that make sense? If someone gets expelled from the phd program, they have simply failed to weather the storm and have no chance of showing any growth in collaboration (at least within the context of the PhD cohort).
ReplyDeleteI want to compliment both the set-up and the comments on this post. Good job! The authors laid out a good, causal argument with clear hypotheses (I didn't read the old ones, but way to respond to feedback and keep the conversation going). Because the writing was so clear, it then made it easier for others to give substantive feedback. And the feedback was great.
ReplyDeleteThe comments made suggest a number of "next steps" to develop this argument/theory if you were to take it forward. There are some arguments/explanations to strengthen/augment, but I think you are on track for that. the bigger issue is methods. To make things even clearer, I think you would want to address time. For example, if you said that identification at time one, moderated by adversity at time two (maybe time one, I could made different arguments here depending on the scope of your time frame), affects collaboration at time two. Sorting out the measurements also becomes important, as Sara and Brendan point out.