Victorious and Hierarchical: Past Performance as a Determinant of Team Hierarchical Differentiation

Hierarchies emerge as collectives attempt to organize themselves toward successful performance. Consequently, research has focused on how team hierarchies affect performance. We extend existing models of the hierarchy-performance relationship by adopting an alternative: Performance is not only an output of hierarchy but also a critical input, as teams’ hierarchical differentiation may vary based on whether they are succeeding. Integrating research on exploitation and exploration with work on group attributions, we argue that teams engage in exploitation by committing to what they attribute as the cause of their performance success. Specifically, collectives tend to attribute their success to individuals who wielded greater influence within the team; these individuals are consequently granted relatively higher levels of influence, leading to a higher degree of hierarchy. We additionally suggest that the tendency to attribute, and therefore grant more influence, to members believed to be the cause of success is stronger for teams previously higher (versus lower) in hierarchy, as a higher degree of hierarchical differentiation provides clarity as to which members had a greater impact on the team outcome. We test our hypotheses experimentally with teams engaging in an online judgement task and observationally with teams from the National Basketball Association. Our work makes two primary contributions: (a) altering existing hierarchy-performance models by highlighting performance as both an input and output to hierarchy and (b) extending research on the dynamics of hierarchy beyond individual rank changes toward examining what factors increase or decrease hierarchical differentiation of the team as a whole.

Shared credit for shared success: Successful joint performance strengthens the sense of joint agency

When people perform joint actions together, they experience a sense of joint agency, or shared control over actions and their effects. The current study examined how internal and external cues related to the success of a joint action influence joint agency. In three experiments, partners coordinated their actions to produce eight-tone sequences that matched a metronome pace. Across experiments, more successful joint performance (closer match to required pace) elicited stronger feelings of joint agency. This relationship was evident whether participants rated their control over sequence timing or responsibility for task outcome. Furthermore, the relationship was stronger when participants received external cues to joint success compared to when participants could rely only on internal cues. These findings indicate that people derive their sense of joint agency from success at the level of the dyad and that cues to joint agency may be weighted according to their salience in a given context.

Responsibility Diffusion in Cooperative Collectives

The authors examined questions about diffusion of responsibility in groups by asking group members to apportion responsibility for an outcome to each group member: Does responsibility diffuse more as groups increase in size but eventually level off in larger groups? Does responsibility diffuse equally, with each member getting an equal portion, or is it concentrated on certain individuals? Do group members apportion responsibility in ways that maximize their own self-esteem? Dyads attributed more responsibility to others after failure than success, but four-person groups tended to take the blame for failure. Overall, however, responsibility diffused in proportion to group size as group members concentrated more responsibility on some group members and withheld responsibility from others through specific role allocations. There was a significant degree of consensus in group members’ perceptions of individual members’ contributions to performance, but members generally felt they contributed more to the group than did other members.

Group Members as Actors and Observers in Attributions of Responsibility for Group Performance

Previous research indicates group members have a highly variable pattern of internal and external attributions for their performance. The authors propose that part of this variability may be explained by group members making their attributions from the perspective of both the actor and the observer. Following a pooled-performance task, group members reported inflated internal and external attributions for factors responsible for their performance as compared with attributions individuals made for their own performance. Similarly, group members reported an inflated internal and external attribution pattern of factors responsible for a similar group's performance compared to attributions individuals made for the performance of a similar other. The results demonstrate that unique processes occur in the attributions of group members compared to the attributions of individuals for their performance.