Research suggests business leaders should re-think how they treat team members

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/ncsu-rsb110415.php

Public Release: 4-Nov-2015
Research suggests business leaders should re-think how they treat team members
North Carolina State University

New findings from an international team of researchers suggest business leaders who oversee teams need to find a middle ground in how they treat team members - or risk hurting team performance. Specifically, the researchers found that treating some team members much better than others can adversely affect performance - as can treating all team members the same way.

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"In practice, leaders should not treat all members the same - there needs to be some differentiation based on competence and ability - but they also need to avoid engaging in extreme preferential treatment," Kirkman says.

The researchers also found two factors that influenced how much differential treatment a team could withstand before adversely affecting performance. First, larger teams - such as those with 10 or more members - could withstand more differentiation.

"This is because larger teams have greater needs for coordination and integration and putting more resources towards more capable members actually helps these processes get accomplished," Kirkman says.

The second factor is the "power distance orientation" of the team. Power distance orientation is an evaluation of how accepting a given culture is of power differences between individuals and the social importance of hierarchy.

"A team whose members are in higher power distance countries, such as India, will likely react less negatively to differential treatment than a team in a lower power distance country, such as Australia or Israel," Kirkman says. "Teams in lower power distance countries may simply reject this sort of differential treatment."

The paper, "Understanding the Curvilinear Relationships between LMX Differentiation and Team Coordination and Performance," is published online in the journal Personnel Psychology. Lead author of the paper is Yang Sui, of the University of Science and Technology. The paper was co-authored by Kirkman, Hui Wang of Peking University and Ning Li of the University of Iowa. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.