Preparing the Self for Team Entry: How Relational Affirmation Improves Team Performance

Abstract

Working in teams often leads to productivity loss because the need to feel accepted prevents individual members from making a unique contribution to the team in terms of the information or perspective they can offer. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we propose that pre-team relational self-affirmation can prepare individuals to contribute to team creative performance more effectively. We theorize that relationally-affirming one's self-views increases general feelings of being socially valued by others, leading to better information exchange and creative performance. In a first study, we found that teams in which members affirmed their best selves prior to team formation (i.e., by soliciting and receiving narratives that highlight one's positive impact on close others) outperformed teams that did not do so on a creative problem-solving task. In the second experiment, conducted using virtual teams, we show that pre-team relational self-affirmation leads to heightened feelings of social worth, which in turn explains the effect of the treatment on the team's ability to exchange information.Keywords: relational self-affirmation; team entry; team creative performance; information exchange; social worth. Relational Affirmation in Teams 3Preparing the Self for Team Entry: How Relational Affirmation Improves Team PerformanceEffective communication is a key feature of a team's capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000;Gardner, Gino, and Staats, 2012). Unfortunately, as members are introduced to a team, one critical issue that may impede effective team communication is each member's need to feel accepted by the others (Wittenbaum and Stasser, 1996;Gruenfeld et al., 1996). The need to feel accepted can lead individual members to prioritize fitting in over contributing unique information and adding maximum value to the team. For example, teams are biased toward repeating previously-mentioned shared information, as opposed to sharing unique information, because repetition helps members appear "cognitively central and thus task competent" (Wittenbaum, Hubbell, and Zuckerman, 1999; p. 968). In addition, team members are more likely to share socially-endorsed information within the team if they believe the information to be useful to the team as compared to information that has not been socially-validated (Littlepage, Perdue, and Fuller, 2012). Thus, individual team members' need for social acceptance may hinder the team's ability to share and integrate information in order to accomplish their task.One remedy to this problem is for members to invest time after team formation, to highlight their differences in ideas, background and perspectives. As evidenced in a qualitative study of diverse teams by Ely and Thomas (2001), openly discussing the unique qualities of different team members and integrating diverse perspectives allowed individuals to feel valued and respected. The team members were able to apply their differences in knowledge, and the perspectives associated with their unique identities, to the task at hand...

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