Team Dynamics
Learn proven strategies to improve team dynamics, resolve conflict, boost motivation, and create high-performing, collaborative teams.
Maybe your team operates like a well-oiled machine. Even well-oiled machines need recalibrations and repairs from time to time. The same goes for high-performing teams.
Continually improving team dynamics helps with team performance optimization by keeping team members engaged, encouraging collaboration, and ensuring healthy differences don’t escalate into destructive conflicts.
What are team dynamics? They’re how members of a group interact while working together toward a common goal, like building a new product or launching a marketing campaign.
Below, we share proven tips and tactics for improving team dynamics, from identifying signs of team dysfunctions to employee motivation techniques. After all, no matter how great your team’s performance, it can always get better.
How to Deal with Conflict: Too Much or Not Enough
When improving team dynamics, leaders may need to deal with two situations that are dual sides of a coin: team conflict and groupthink. While conflicts can result in a failure to collaborate effectively, a team’s desire to avoid conflict can be just as damaging. Here’s how to handle conflict in your team.
Conflict Resolution in Teams
High-functioning teams typically consist of members with complementary rather than identical strengths, skills, and experiences. This diversity provides the breadth of ideas necessary for innovation and high performance.
However, diverse opinions and personalities can easily lead to conflicts and incivility that impede collaboration and contribute to a hostile, unproductive workplace. Such conflicts, SHRM estimates, cost U.S. organizations a collective $2 billion daily in lost productivity and absenteeism. It’s little wonder, then, that improving team dynamics often focuses on team conflict management techniques.
One popular framework for conflict resolution is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict-Mode Instrument. It breaks down five basic styles of managing conflict in teams:
- Competing: A highly assertive, uncompromising style in which a person prioritizes having their goal or opinion accepted, whether it’s standing up for their right to a day off or insisting that their choice of action is the correct one.
- Collaborating: Seeks a win-win resolution by focusing on each party’s needs, interests, and points of view.
- Compromising: A less-assertive style than collaborating that’s more concerned with finding a serviceable middle ground than with understanding the reasons for the conflict and working toward an ideal solution.
- Avoiding: Team members try to ignore the issue or evade attempts to resolve it.
- Accommodating: A person will give in to demands to avoid conflict.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to managing conflict. The Competing style might be necessary in an emergency or urgent situation, but will erode team dynamics if used frequently, for instance.
Regardless of the style, effective workplace conflict resolution strategies are built on a foundation of open communication, mutual respect, and empathy. If team members cannot resolve the conflict themselves, a team leader needs to intervene. That entails actively listening to each participant’s point of view to identify the problem and working with the team member to find a workable solution. If necessary, the team might need to call in a third party with advanced conflict resolution training to mediate.
Overcoming Groupthink in Teams and Business
Like team conflict, groupthink can erode high performance due to how it affects team decision-making psychology. Groupthink occurs when team members are so eager for cohesiveness or anxious to avoid conflict that they choose the least objectionable resolution to a problem or agree with the decisions of others without considering whether those are the best choices. Under groupthink, members might also fail to raise valid concerns for fear of retribution.
One surefire way to prevent groupthink, whether in meetings or other business activities, and encourage diverse perspectives is ensuring psychological safety in teams. People will speak up only when they trust their fellow team members not to denigrate them. If team leaders note a consistent lack of dissent or exchange of ideas, they should reinforce the ground rules of open communication, including active listening, respectful language, and constructive rather than destructive criticism. Leaders might also need to actively solicit feedback as a means of fostering diverse workplace ideas.
Motivation Plus Engagement Equals High Performance
Avoiding both unproductive conflicts and groupthink goes a long way toward improving team dynamics, which helps with motivating teams at work. Studies show that motivation directly influences performance. Motivated employees tend to have high levels of engagement, further improving employee productivity. According to Gallup, organizations with highly engaged employees are 23% more profitable and 14% more productive than those with low levels of engagement. In addition, they have 63% fewer safety incidents and experience 21% less turnover.
The link between productivity and team engagement is clear. But signs of low team motivation, disengagement, and declining productivity might not be so apparent. Because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, you need to periodically measure team health metrics.
Monitoring team productivity is fairly straightforward. Track relevant, quantifiable team performance KPIs: customer satisfaction scores for a customer care team or orders picked per hour for an order fulfillment team. You’ll also want to look at employee activity data, such as how long it took each team member to successfully complete their assignments. Monitoring team productivity KPIs isn’t a one-and-done exercise; how the metrics trend is just as important as the baseline metrics.
Employee engagement measurement can be trickier, as it’s more qualitative than quantitative. Team leaders should conduct regular one-on-one meetings with employees where employees are free to discuss concerns without fear of recrimination. Complement the meetings with regular questionnaires focused on morale, engagement, communication, and collaboration that team members can answer anonymously, which is especially important for teams lacking psychological safety.
Because everyone has different intrinsic and extrinsic drivers, psychometric motivation assessments help you determine the best tactics for spurring individual team members to do their best work. When the team as a whole seems to be disengaged, consider implementing any of these workplace motivation strategies:
- Give and solicit feedback. Regularly providing constructive criticism and meaningful feedback is a great way to boost motivation and improve team dynamics: A Gallup study found that 80% of employees who had received meaningful feedback in the previous week considered themselves fully engaged. It’s also important to regularly ask team members for suggestions regarding your performance as a leader and to respond calmly and thoughtfully so that members continue to feel safe about speaking out.
- Clarify team and individual roles and goals. Ensure each member knows how important their performance is to the overall team and organizational goals, and be sure to define success for team members and for the team as a whole.
- Offer opportunities for development and growth. These could be training, mentoring, or new responsibilities. In addition to strengthening the team’s capabilities, helping employees broaden their skill sets shows you value them enough to invest in them, which is a great motivator.
Celebrate effort as well as achievement. There can only be one top-performing salesperson or one fastest packer, but others may have worked just as much or provided vital support. So recognize and reward small wins as well as big ones: a team lunch for meeting a tight deadline or a reward for the employee who showed the greatest monthly KPI gains.
Identifying and Fixing Toxic Team Environments
Unhealthy team behavior patterns can lead to unwillingness or inability to communicate and collaborate, disengagement with the team and the job, and a lack of motivation. This, in turn, often results in missed deadlines, sloppy work, and a lack of accountability. That’s why, in addition to performance KPIs, meetings, and surveys, you should observe your team in action to identify early signs of team dysfunction. Here are some warning signs of what to look for.
Signs of Toxic Workplace Culture
These aren’t the only red flags, but they’re among the most common:
- High turnover rates. Employees are 10.4 times more likely to leave a company because of a toxic workplace than they are due to low compensation, according to MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Weak work-life boundaries. Examples of poor work-life boundaries include expecting employees to check email on vacations and days off, criticizing those who take their full complement of time off, and encouraging people to work while sick.
- Finger pointing. When problems arise, employees should focus on working together to resolve the issues rather than assigning blame.
- Cliques, gossip, and outcasts. It’s inevitable that some co-workers will mesh better than others. But when particular team members are regularly excluded from projects, lunches, or Slack groups, that’s toxic.
- Lack of transparency. This can range from undefined responsibilities to gatekeeping of information regarding goals and failure to disclose organizational financial performance.
- Lack of support. This, too, spans a broad gamut, including failure to provide employees with necessary equipment, not offering feedback or guidance, and providing limited or zero growth opportunities.
How to Build Trust and Collaboration
Would you trust colleagues who regularly made you a scapegoat? How about a team leader who continually changed goals and expectations without telling you? Would you be comfortable collaborating with them or be fully engaged in your work? A lack of trust is at the root of many toxic workplace and team cultures.
Trust and performance are intrinsically linked; a McKinsey study found that teams scoring high on trust were 3.3 times more efficient and 5.1 times more likely to produce results than low-trust teams. Improving team trust and relationships goes hand in hand with improving team dynamics and productivity.
Open, consistent, effective team communication is the foundation of trust. Even then, team members might not feel they know each other well enough to fully trust one another. In that case, the following workplace team-building activities for trust can help:
- Sharing personal histories. Gather team members together and have them answer a few basic questions, such as “Where did you grow up?”, “What was your first job?”, and “What is your dream vacation?” People are apt to relate better to one another once they learn that, say, several of them worked in fast food after school or love kimchi. Two Truths and a Lie is another take on this.
- 4 Ls retrospective. This exercise is for project or sprint postmortems. Team members share what they liked, learned, lacked, and longed for while working on the project. It allows participants to better understand each other’s approaches to work as well as reinforces their identity as a team.
- Problem-solving activities. Figuring out how to improve collaboration can be as simple as putting a fun problem in front of a team. Whether it’s working in groups to complete jigsaw puzzles, going to an escape room, or the time-honored egg-drop challenge, these sorts of collaboration exercises for teams compel participants to work with and trust their teammates.
- Volunteer or community service activities. Among the many reasons to develop workplace community service programs is improving team dynamics. One study found that 64% of employees who volunteer have stronger work relations.
Even fun team-building ideas like these should be considered work activities and therefore conducted during work hours. Mandating participation outside of work hours would be a blurring of work-life boundaries.
How Team Leadership Influences Workplace Power Dynamics
Just as fruit rots from the top, so do team relationships. For that reason, improving team dynamics must start with managers, as leadership and team performance are intrinsically related. Leaders need to optimize their leadership style, be aware of power dynamics in teams, and manage hierarchical imbalances.
There are four basic workplace leadership styles:
- Autocratic leaders typically dictate decisions with little, if any, input from team members. Like the competing style of resolving conflict discussed earlier, autocratic leadership can be effective in emergencies but doesn’t foster trust or motivation otherwise.
- Democratic leaders solicit feedback, insist on open communication, encourage collaboration, and model the behavior they expect from team members.
- Transformative leaders emphasize innovation and change. They might sometimes feel the need to make decisions without seeking consensus, but in general, they prioritize motivating the team to excel.
- Laissez-faire leaders trust team members to do their best work with minimal oversight or input. Self-starters and those who prefer to work on their own are apt to thrive under this management style, while those who favor a more collaborative environment might not.
The best leaders adapt their natural leadership style to the situation. Someone who is typically laissez-faire, for instance, will need to offer more guidance and feedback when the team needs more clarity.
According to Harvard Business Review, teams that balance authority and collaboration are 50% more productive and 60% more innovative than those that don’t. Striking the ideal balance is critical to ensuring an effective power structure in teams. Leaders who hoard information, micromanage, routinely single out the same team members for praise, or fail to delegate effectively create an unofficial power hierarchy certain to cause resentment and lack of motivation among those who feel their input doesn’t matter.
Which is not to say that teams shouldn’t have power hierarchies. However, they need to be clearly communicated in the same way as roles and goals. Regardless of where team members fall in the hierarchy, they should all receive the same level of support and growth opportunities.
Improving Team Dynamics with Wonderlic
Employees, managers, and organizational leaders alike have something to gain from improving team dynamics: greater productivity, engagement, and satisfaction. But getting started can be a challenge. That’s why we developed Wonderlic Team Dynamics, an extension of our Wonderlic Develop tool.
Wonderlic Team Dynamics provides employees with insights into their natural strengths as well as how they and their teammates best work — alone and together — helping improve their collaboration skills in the workplace.
Team Dynamics gives managers the tools and know-how to build the most effective teams based on leading industrial-organizational psychology and leading communication and team-building strategies. It also gives managers deep insights into employees’ development needs and desires. Leaders can also use Team Dynamics to create and maintain an environment of psychological safety by understanding how to best communicate with each employee and using its techniques and tips to foster positive, constructive team dynamics.
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