I attended a talk last week where the focus was on the importance of good, solid interpersonal relationships to the bottom line. No one in attendance disagreed with this somewhat obvious idea, but one question by a young woman resulted in a lively discussion and debate amongst the group. She asked, “How do you know if it’s great relationships that affect the bottom line or that a great bottom line is the recipe for great interpersonal relationships? In other words, which comes first, the chicken (relationships) or the egg (performance)?
In my continual quest to report and link the best academic research with important practical questions, I told this woman about a seminal article written by Dr. Barry Staw, a leading management academic at the University of California, Berkeley. It turns out that the woman’s question has been asked before and the answer was not what the experts giving the talk were promoting. According to Dr. Staw, it’s high performance that leads to strong relationships and not vice versa. In his classic experiment, Staw gave teams false feedback about their performance and then asked members to provide “objective” descriptions of how member had interacted. Teams randomly assigned to the high performance conditions reported more harmonious and better communications than did groups assigned to the low performance condition. Conclusion: If you want your employees and teams to bond, focus on garnering great performance out of them before working on the intricacies of their relationships with one another. Seems like common sense in some ways……well yes, but sometimes we need reminding since as we know common sense doesn’t always lead to common practice.
