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Excellence in teams: how to achieve performance gains in working groups
Edited by Guido Hertel
There is considerable evidence that under the right conditions, members of task groups or teams can be more strongly motivated and more productive than comparable individual performers (see [1] Baron and Kerr, 2003). For example, it has been shown that superior team members may boost their efforts if this is required to socially compensate for the anticipated poor performance of inferior-ability members (e.g. [23] Williams and Karau, 1991). The present study focuses on one such group motivation-gain phenomenon, the Köhler motivation gain effect ([13] Köhler, 1926) - a tendency - primarily by inferior team members - to perform better than comparable individuals when they are members of a team working under conjunctive task demands, where it is the performance of the least capable member that defines the group's level of performance ([21] Steiner, 1972). Our immediate focus is on whether and how this motivation gain is affected by the social ties among group members. Specifically, we seek to better understand if being friends with co-workers - liking one another, being well acquainted, having continuing interdependent relationships - makes a difference in worker motivation.
Several studies of the Köhler motivation gain effect have by now established that it is quite robust (see [22] Weber and Hertel, 2007 for a meta-analysis). Other studies have determined a number of boundary conditions and moderators (e.g. [9] Kerr et al. , 2005; [15] Lount et al. , 2000). For example, Köhler himself was particularly interested in the moderating effect of the discrepancy in team-mates' abilities, and showed that the motivation gain was maximal when that discrepancy was moderate, namely a ratio of about 3:4 between team-mates ([13] Köhler, 1926). Most importantly, recent research has identified the psychological processes that underlie it (e.g. [5] Hertel et al. , 2008; [10] Kerr et al. , 2007). The Köhler motivation gain results from two psychological mechanisms. The first component of the effect is due to a social comparison mechanism. Simply discovering that you are performing less well than another person can be sufficient to boost effort for any of several reasons, including goal setting, interpersonal competition, or the pursuit of favorable social evaluations. This mechanism does not...