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Creating Flourishing Teams

Monday 13 December, 2010
Under what conditions do teams flourish? Science provides a precise answer that we can apply to our teams to know if it's one in which people are flourishing and doing their best work.

As part of our survival strategy as a species, humans do better when we experience positive emotions. Back on the savannah, positive emotions would have increased our ancestors' odds of survival, to reproduce, of being more inclined to explore and to develop social connections. Negative emotions narrow people's behaviour to life-preserving responses, of being defensive and being asocial.

Our preference towards positivity means that we require certain conditions in order to flourish. We need a greater dose of positive feelings directed at us than negative, and the science is precise as to how much more.

Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada study the impact of positive affect (feeling grateful, upbeat; expressing appreciation, liking) and negative affect (feeling contemptuous, irritable; expressing disdain, disliking). The key concept that Fredrickson and Losada explore is what they call the positivity ratio - the ratio of pleasant feelings and sentiments to unpleasant ones over time.

Work teams that flourish

Fredrickson and Losada have conducted and reviewed a number of studies covering the impact of positive and negative affect on psychological health, marriages and work teams.

In one study on work teams, the interactions of 60 teams were observed. Behind two-way mirrors, the researchers coded all utterances as positive if speakers showed support, encouragement or appreciation and as negative if speakers showed disapproval, sarcasm or cynicism. Later, it was identified that 15 of the teams were high-performing teams on measures of profitability, customer satisfaction and performance evaluations. Twenty six of the teams were identified as moderate performance teams and 19 were assessed as low performing.

From this and other research, a precise mathematical model predicts that humans and groups of people will flourish at a positivity ratio of 2.9 (let's round it up to "3") - that for every one negative affect, there are at least three positive affects. (Marriages need a higher ratio to prosper and survive: around 5:1 which stands to reason because of the closeness of marriage and the importance of the opinions of our life partner.)

For teams that are not functioning well - those that might be identified as languishing - positivity ratios fall below 2.9; positive interactions might still outweigh negative interactions, but not by enough. For example, twice the number of positive behaviours to negative behaviours is not enough to flourish. We need at least three times as many. Is there an upper limit? Yes, but it's a large number. Flourishing drops off after a positive affect of 11.6. The researchers say that there appears to be a role for appropriate negativity, such as constructive feedback connected to specific circumstances.

Implications for leaders

Individuals will flourish in an environment where positive language and interactions outnumber negative interactions by at least 3 to 1. Leaders have a twofold responsibility in ensuring the dose of positivity in which teams and team members will flourish:

  1. That your personal interactions and language is in the range of between 3:1 and 11:1, and
  2. That interactions between team members is in the same range.

You might monitor the incidence of people expressing feelings of appreciation, encouragement, liking and being upbeat. We do our best work and the team is most successful when we can meet our instinctive needs of being in an environment of optimism and positivity over pessimism and negativity.

Source: Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada, "Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing" in American Psychologist, October 2005 pp 678 - 686

Author Credits

Andrew O'Keeffe, Hardwired Humans. Hardwired Humans assists business leaders design and implement people strategies based on human instincts. Through understanding human instincts leaders can predict what will work and can avoid the predictable mistakes if instincts are ignored. For further information visit the web site: www.hardwiredhumans.com
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