The creation of a third culture requires four primary steps. First, teams must explore what each individual in the group has to offer in terms of personal characteristics and style, as well as knowledge, skills and possible contributions. Second, they should systematically decide on – and develop – an agreed and commonly understood goal to which all team members are committed. Third, the team needs to decide who should do what. Roles and responsibilities must be clear for each team member, with steps for checking accountability to avoid a “social loafing”, where one or more team members shirk their duties while others do most of the work.
The fourth and most important step is to work out “how we get there”. This entails setting the rules of engagement for team culture: how often do members meet; what are their expectations; how will they communicate with each other; what kind of language is acceptable and not acceptable; how can they engage in constructive criticism?
“Teams need to spend time to create the culture,” Lytle says. “An organisation doesn’t just bloom and flourish within a day. Neither does a team. A team has to be just as conscious about its values, knowing each other and figuring out how it wants to go about the process of working together.”
In a forthcoming paper, ASB postdoctoral research fellow Ju Li Ng, University of Queensland senior lecturer Oluremi (Remi) Ayoko and ASB professor Karin Sanders also find that organisational values are crucial to the effective development of teams. However, while in the past it has been felt that a top-down approach from senior management most influences corporate values and culture, they argue that the importance of a complementary bottom-up – or emergent – process has been underestimated.
“It’s a wake-up call for managers,” says Ng. “Yes, top-down is important – we don’t deny that … but to draw strength from each individual it is important to know how to build that and use individual values to bring it to the team.”
In their study – Mirroring ‘I’ Into ‘We’: The Emergent Process from Individual Values Into Team Values – Ng, Ayoko and Sanders explore insights into the importance of understanding and knowing how to reap the strength of individual values for team and organisational benefits.
In a two-study design, they advance emergence process research by examining the dynamics through which micro-phenomena (individual values) become meso-phenomena (team values) in the context of teamwork. The first study reveals that team values are the product of individual and organisational values, while the second study shows that individual values are a key driver of team values and, especially, that the bottom-up process of team-values development is more powerful than the top-down process.
Ng says the findings provide crucial implications for knowledge-based workforces.
“Instead of pushing down organisational values – top-down – it is important to assimilate new employees or new team members using the bottom-up approach,” she says. “In terms of managing values in an organisation, if you recognise that employees come with their individual values, it is important to embrace those individual values and how they can contribute to the team.”
The paper notes the impact of particular values. For example, conformity values work well in both a bottom-up and top-down context, whereas self-direction values indicate that the bottom-up approach is stronger over time.
“So, recognising that, senior managers can use this mechanism to trigger different values at different times for different purposes,” Ng says.
