Creative People Must Be Stopped shows how individuals and organizations sabotage their own best intentions to encourage “outside the box” thinking. It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks.

[Producer's Note: We apologize for the slight audio problems in this interview. We'll be hard at work resolving the issue...once we figure out what caused it.]

In this interview, we discuss his latest project, StandOut, a combination book and strengths assessment that uses an innovative new research methodology to reveal your top two “strength Roles.” StandOut goes beyond description to give people practical strategies that fit their strengths, and provide managers with quick insights on how to get the best from each member of their team.

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.