(Press-News.org) Benefits of team building exercises jeopardised if not truly voluntary
Employees who like to keep their work and private lives separate may want to avoid team-building exercises
Study shows why some colleagues hate compulsory team bonding
Spending time with people you aren't close could be more effective than general team bonding exercises
Zoom dress up parties, tug-of-war, 'trust falls' and escape rooms - team building exercises have become the go-to tool for managers trying to increase organisational and team rapport and productivity, but unfortunately many employees resent compulsory bonding and often regard these exercises as the bane of their workplace existence.
A paper published this week by University of Sydney School of Project Management researchers in the Journal of Social Networks has found participants have mixed feelings about team-building interventions, with the research revealing ethical implications in forcing employees to take part.
"Since publishing our previous research on team-building exercises, many workers told us that they despise team building activities and see them as a waste of time, so we decided to look in more depth at what's behind this," said the paper's lead researcher, Dr Petr Matous, who in 2019 published research with Dr Julien Pollack that argued spending time developing relationships with people you aren't close to is more effective than general team-bonding exercises.
"Almost every day at work, workers are subjected to interventions that are implicitly or explicitly designed to change our networks of working relationships," said Dr Matous.
"Teams are formed, merged and restructured, staff are relocated and office spaces are redesigned. We are expected to participate in drinks after work and team building events. All this is done with the aim of improving workplace effectiveness, efficiency, collaboration and cohesion - but does any of this work?" said Dr Matous.
The study found that team-building exercises which focused on the sharing of, and intervening into personal attitudes and relationships between team members may be considered too heavy-handed and intrusive, although the researchers say some degree of openness and vulnerability is often necessary to make deep, effective connections with colleagues.
"Among the participants we interviewed, some were against team building exercises because they felt they were implicitly compulsory and did not welcome management's interest in their lives beyond their direct work performance."
"Many people do not want to be forced into having fun or making friends, especially not on top of their busy jobs or in stressful, dysfunctional environments where team building is typically called for," said Associate Professor Julien Pollack, Interim Director of the John Grill Institute of Project Leadership.
"These activities often feel implicitly mandatory. People can feel that management is being too nosy or trying to control their life too much.
"We recommend an approach where people can opt out of team building discreetly, by conducting team-building only among selected pairs of individuals who can choose whether or not to proceed with strengthening their relationship. Their choice would not be visible to management.
"An important point is to target the right relationships, and we can do that by analytically identifying critical links in collaboration and communication networks among employees.
The researchers said there are numerous schools of thought that propose differing psychological methods for strengthening relationships.
In this study the researchers chose a self-disclosure approach where participants were guided through a series of questions that allowed them to increasingly disclose personal information and values. The method is well-tested and has been shown to increase interpersonal closeness, however, to be successful it must be voluntary.
"With caution, many relational methods to improve teams and organisations can be borrowed from other fields. The question is how to apply them effectively to strengthen an entire collective, which is more than just the sum of individual relationships, and that's where analysing methods using network science makes the main contribution," said Dr Matous.
INFORMATION:
Declaration:
The study was an in-depth exploration and qualitative review of processes and personal perceptions, where the researchers interviewed a cohort of participants and their colleagues on team building. The published paper's purpose is to share experiences and challenges from organising team-building interventions, collecting rigorous data for both managerial and academic applications.
CONTACT:
Luisa Low, Media and PR Adviser, University of Sydney
61 435 213 193
luisa.low@sydney.edu.au
EUGENE, Ore. -- Feb. 25, 2021 -- When the pungent smell of rotting food sends a person running, that disgusted feeling is an evolved response that helps avoid exposure to pathogens, say University of Oregon anthropologists.
In a project that blended anthropology, biology and psychology, UO researchers explored disgust behaviors among Ecuador's indigenous Shuar people. Those living in the most market-integrated households were found to have the highest levels of disgust sensitivity.
The research was detailed in a paper published online Feb. 23 ahead of print ...
Climate change-driven extreme weather events, including devastating Australian bushfires, have created the urgent need for a new approach to planning and building in high fire risk areas and a shift to climate-resilient towns and cities.
Published in the prestigious 'Nature Urban Sustainability', research co-author John Curtin Distinguished Professor Peter Newman from the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute said climate change had increased the threat of bushfires and other climate change issues driving an urgent need to revise the location and design of settlements.
"Bushfires have become more frequent and more ...
Just as environmentally conscious scientists predicted, our excessive use of plastics is coming back to bite us. Microplastics (MPs), plastic particles smaller than a few millimeters, can now be found everywhere, but more so in seawater. As expected, MPs are harmful to both environment and health, although their exact effects are unclear.
To get a better grasp of the extent of the MP problem, it is necessary to quantify how much we are exposed to them. Table salt has been shown to contain MPs, making it an ideal study target to gauge human exposure to MPs. Although many studies have measured the concentration of ...
The water cycle over the Tibetan Plateau (TP), as known as "Asian Water Tower", is vital to the regional and downstream climate and ecosystem. A new study found that the interannual variability of the summer precipitation recycle ratio over the TP is influenced by the El NIño events in preceding winters. The study was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and conducted by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The precipitation recycle ratio is the contribution rate of the local evaporation ...
X-ray imaging is widely used in areas such as healthcare and forensic science, but existing X-ray machines are unable to capture curved three-dimensional (3D) objects at high resolution, and they are also relatively expensive. Now, an international team of researchers led by chemists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has demonstrated a potential solution to overcome these limitations by using nanocrystals that can trap X-rays.
The research, which was conducted with collaborators from Fuzhou University and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, could be used not only for healthcare but also to detect defects in electronics, authenticate valuable works of art, or examine archaeological objects at microscopic scale.
The findings were ...
WASHINGTON--Puberty looks different, in terms of both reproductive hormones and breast maturation, in girls with excess total body fat, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Previous studies found that girls with obesity start puberty and experience their first menstrual period earlier than girls with normal weight. It is unknown if excess body fat can alter not only the timing of puberty, but also a girl's reproductive hormone levels and development of reproductive organs such as the breasts, ovaries and uterus.
"We found that in mid- to late puberty, girls with greater total body fat demonstrated higher ...
A modeling study suggests a majority of adult COVID-19 hospitalizations nationwide are attributable to at least one of four pre-existing conditions: obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure, in that order.
The study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) and led by researchers at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, used a mathematical simulation to estimate the number and proportion of national COVID-19 hospitalizations that could have been prevented if Americans did not suffer from four major cardiometabolic conditions. Each condition has been strongly linked in other studies to increased risk of poor outcomes with COVID-19 infection.
"While ...
Curtin University research has found people grieving a COVID-related death would benefit from timely support and care to reduce the high risk of experiencing problems in important areas of everyday life.
Published in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, the study is the first to focus on psychological factors that explain why people bereaved by COVID-19 might experience challenges in important areas of life, work, leisure, and relationships.
Lead author, Associate Professor Lauren Breen from the Curtin School of Population Health worked with American researchers to survey people in the United States who had lost a close person due to COVID-19 and found key psychological factors such as separation ...
The hypothetical stars are among the simplest exotic compact objects proposed and constitute well founded dark matter candidates. Within this interpretation, the team is able to estimate the mass of a new particle constituent of these stars, an ultra-light boson with a mass billions of times smaller than that of the electron. Their analysis has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters on 24 February 2021.
The team is co-led by Dr. Juan Calderón Bustillo, a former professor from the Department of Physics at CUHK and now "La Caixa Junior Leader - Marie Curie Fellow", at the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics, ...
A new comprehensive course incorporating an interdisciplinary approach to disaster preparedness shows promise for better equipping health professionals in responding to disasters.
Medical staff and researchers from Tohoku University and Fukushima Medical University organized the program. The two universities are well equipped in disaster response and preparedness given their regions were at the epicenter of the deadly 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
Their findings were published in the Journal of Disaster Research.
"From the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we have learned that disaster medical personnel are required to play the role of conductors in site selection dispatching and on-site activities," said Hiroyuki Sasaki at the ...
