Employees help each other by offering advice, lending a hand, resolving conflicts, and celebrating each other’s achievements. Employees that receive trustworthy help from others feel an obligation to reciprocate, which strengthens work relationships. Good citizens in thriving work relationships will be motivated to find ways to perform their tasks more effectively and efficiently. Employees that help each other strengthen the bonds of trust with team members and supervisors, and we know trust has a strong effect on performance.

Unfortunately, good team relationships won’t matter much if employees aren’t given the latitude to improve their jobs. And good team relationships will struggle to develop when employees can’t help each other because they are constrained to “just worry about getting your job done.”

A study by Muammer Ozer recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below) showed how autonomy affected the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and job performance. This study of 266 employees, coworkers, and supervisors showed that citizenship behavior improved work team relationships, and work team relationships had a significant effect on job performance.

Those relationships between citizenship behavior, teamwork, and performance are expected. What’s new here is the importance of autonomy in enabling this virtuous chain of behaviors. The study found that the links to performance were enhanced for those with the most job autonomy. Highly autonomous workers were better citizens, had better team relationships, and were better at translating those team relationships into improved performance.

Because autonomy matters so much to most workers, it matters to your business. Constrain your employees’ ability to help each other and work together to improve their jobs and you will likely also constrain the growth of your business. Help yourself by helping your employees help each other.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Citation: Ozer, M. (2012). A Moderated Mediation Model of the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Hurley about the importance of trust, how the decision to trust is made and how leaders can become more trustworthy.

In this episode, we welcome back Les to the podcast and discuss his new book The Synergist, which focuses on getting executive teams to work better together.

The results show that the worst thing you can do for group performance is to set nonspecific goals. Even easy, specific goals are better for group performance than nonspecific goals. Setting specific difficult goals has the best effect on group performance. Specific goals supported by specific metrics send employees unambiguous and consistent signals about expected performance behaviors.

The most interesting finding to me was that “egocentric goals (aimed at maximizing individual performance) undermine group performance, whereas groupcentric goals (aimed at maximizing the individual contribution to the group) enhance group performance” (p. 7). Goals that force team members to compete with each other undermine group performance.  “When group performance matters, egocentric goals would best be framed as to emphasize the individual contribution to the group” (p. 8).

Select people that value collaboration over competition.  Train them in the knowledge and skills they need to work better with others. Challenge your teams to set high standards for their shared performance, and reward the members that do the most to help the team succeed. Think very carefully about the message you send by rewarding individual performance when the team fails.

Full citation: Kleingeld, A., van Mierlo, H., and Arends, L. (2011). The Effect of Goal Setting on Group Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

In this interview, we discuss the problem of silos in talent management, including what some of the world’s foremost thought leaders recommend and what leading practitioners are doing to fix it.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1993 where he was an honor graduate and a Distinguished Cadet. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army. He spent five years as an Armor officer in a variety of roles including Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, Personnel Officer and ROTC Instructor at Duke University.

After leaving the Army, he joined McKinsey and Company as a management consultant before starting THOUGHleaders. His new book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership is designed to help leaders define who they are and what their personal leadership philosophy is.

This study of 570 employees and 80 upper level managers representing 95 separate teams once again demonstrated that team potency leads to team performance. Team potency, defined as shared confidence in the team’s general capabilities (p. 1), was rated by team members with a seven-item scale (e.g. “the team I work with has above average ability”). Team performance was rated by upper level managers answering questions about both performance (e.g. “rate the overall level of performance that you observe for this team”) and citizenship behavior (e.g. “in general, the team members help others who have been absent”).

This study examined how servant leadership affected the team goal setting process and its subsequent effect on team potency and performance. The authors specifically looked at both goal clarity – how well individual team members understand team goals and their own roles in working toward meeting the team goals – and process clarity – how well team members understand the procedures for accomplishing their roles as they work on team goals. Team members self-reported on servant leadership, goal clarity, and process clarity.

The findings were fascinating. Servant leadership was found to directly affect both team potency and team performance. And goal clarity and process clarity were shown to affect team potency; however, this relationship only worked in the presence of servant leadership. According to the authors:

Our results clearly demonstrated that goal and process clarity contribute the most to the emergence of team potency when accompanied by servant leaders, whose employee-centered focus is beneficial for facilitating team confidence and effective team behaviors. In contrast, the results showed that in the absence of servant leadership, the impact of goal and process clarity on team potency was no longer positive or even became negative. (p.9)

Wow.

If your organization depends on the performance of teams to deliver remarkable results, the members on those teams need to be able to look each other in the eye and clearly believe that they can get the job done (potency). If the team members don’t clearly understand either the team goals or the procedures needed to accomplish the goals, it’s folly to expect them to believe strongly in their collective ability to perform with distinction.

Setting the proper structure for remarkable team performance is necessary but not sufficient. Never forget that your team not only needs to believe in each other, they also need to believe in you and your leadership. They need to know that you don’t just care about the goals, but that you also care about each and every one of them as individuals.

If you lead a team, the evidence clearly suggests that you need to develop your servant leadership behaviors (e.g. behaving ethically, putting employees first, empowering, helping employees grow and succeed), and then train your team members to do the same.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

In this interview, we discuss her latest research project, chronicled in her new book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee engagement and creative productivity

…level of pay had little relation to either job or pay satisfaction. This indicates that within an organization, those who make more money are little more satisfied than those who make considerably less. Moreover, relatively well paid samples of individuals are only trivially more satisfied than relatively poorly paid samples…The results of this review – the first quantitative review to appear in the literature – suggests that earnings are only weakly satisfying to individuals even when they confine their satisfaction to an evaluation of their pay.(p. 162)

Wow. For employees, these findings suggest that if you want a good job (one you are satisfied with), then pay should not be at the top of your shopping list. Other things like interesting and autonomous work and leadership that is more relational than transactional are better predictors of job satisfaction.

For employers, the authors suggest three important implications (p. 163):

1. Don’t mistake satisfaction with motivation. Pay can be used to motivate workers, even if it cannot be used to satisfy them.

2. Having a satisfied workforce is important, but being a pay leader, by itself, is not a good strategy for improving the job satisfaction of your workforce. Look to other things like better supervision, a better work environment, and jobs designed to be engaging.

3. A policy of high pay dispersion does make sense if the most highly paid workers are the ones you want to retain.  High pay is potentially satisfying to the extent that an individual worker looks at her/his colleagues that are paid at or above market levels and perceives a significant difference.

Be careful with number three. If you are going to adopt such a policy, make sure the requirements for achieving significantly higher pay are unambiguous, available to all, and consistently applied. Nothing will poison a satisfied workforce faster than the perception of unfair and disinterested management practices.

[This post originally appeared on Positive Organizational Behavior. Find more great content at www.bretlsimmons.com]

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.