
Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting at the South Pole, December 16, 1911. The photographer was Olav Bjaaland. Amundsen had selected the members of his polar party to ensure that he had at least double coverage of most necessary skills. Each man had designated duties, but there was for each at least one man backing him up in case the man with primary responsibility should become incapacitated. Most teams in problem-solving organizations have only single coverage for critical skills, which Amundsen would have found appalling. Photo courtesy Norwegian-U.S. Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica.
One widely used model of human motivation is Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which orders human needs from lowest to highest as survival, security, belonging, and love, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. According to the model, we focus our attention on the lowest-level unmet need. For instance, fears about safety prevail over any concerns about belonging to the right health club.
In problem-solving organizations, the lowest level needs that come into play are the social needs, including belonging. At home, belonging means a loving family, friends, and a social network. At work, belonging means friendship, respect, and acknowledgment. Belonging is fundamental to self-esteem, and hence to high performance and self-actualization.
When policies, decisions, assignments, and evaluations threaten people's sense of belonging, we threaten their self-esteem and depress performance.
After we remove someone's sense of belonging, high performance is not possible for long. In effect, when we hold out belonging — friendship, respect, acknowledgement, and inclusion — as a reward for performance, we cause an inversion in the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. It's a Catch-22: for humans, belonging is a prerequisite for high performance, but in many workplaces, belonging must be earned by first demonstrating high performance.
When we invert the order of Maslow's hierarchy, we risk a variety of troubles. For example, when we devise team assignments, we tend to focus on team needs and member capabilities. We assign some people with rare capabilities to multiple teams, switching them from team to team as the work requires. Often, the unintended message to those who remain assigned to a single team is that those with rare capability are more valued — they belong not to the team, but to an elite group.
Those who stay put can thus actually feel excluded from the elite. Their need to belong is unmet, which can erode self-esteem, and that affects their performance. Ironically, by using split assignments to optimize team performance, we erode the performance of those whose assignments are not split.
In this way, When we invert the order
of Maslow's hierarchy,
we risk a variety
of troublessplit assignments foster elitism and exclusion. Although the performance of the few might be high, the performance of the many can decline.
Making rare capability less rare is a far better choice. By having the experts train the less expert:
- We reduce the need for split assignments.
- We eliminate bottlenecks because more people can carry out a wider array of responsibilities.
- We build stronger relationships between the most expert and the least expert.
- We mitigate the risks of losing rare expertise to voluntary termination, illness, or accident.
More important, developing expertise limits the perception of elitism and exclusion, enhancing everyone's sense of belonging and self-esteem. The entire organization becomes more capable and productive. Enhanced performance might even enable headcount reduction — a much more sensible path to cost control. Top
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For an examination of the effect of Maslow Hierarchy inversions in the educational system, see The Need to Belong: Rediscovering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs by Norman Kunc in: Villa, R., Thousand, J., Stainback, W. & Stainback, S. Restructuring for Caring & Effective Education. Baltimore: Paul Brookes, 1992.
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Games for Meetings: I
- We spend a lot of time and emotional energy in meetings, much of it engaged in any of dozens of ritualized
games. Here's Part I of a little catalog of some of our favorites, and what we can do about them.
Finding the Third Way
- When a team is divided, and agreement seems out of reach, attempts to resolve the conflict usually focus
on the differences between the contrasting positions. Focusing instead on their similarities can be
a productive technique for reaching agreement.
Hill Climbing and Its Limitations
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The key word is "usually."
Entry Intimidation
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and for the group as a whole. Four trouble patterns related to entry intimidation are inadvertent subversion,
bullying, hat hanging, and defenses and sabotage.
Red Flags: II
- When we find clear evidence of serious problems in a project or other collaboration, we sometimes realize
that we had overlooked several "red flags" that had foretold trouble. In this Part II of our
review of red flags, we consider communication patterns that are useful indicators of future problems.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Emotions at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming September 27: On Working Breaks in Meetings
- When we convene a meeting to work a problem, we sometimes find that progress is stalled. Taking a break to allow a subgroup to work part of the problem can be key to finding simple, elegant solutions rapidly. Choosing the subgroup is only the first step. Available here and by RSS on September 27.
And on October 4: Self-Importance and Conversational Narcissism at Work: I
- Conversational narcissism is a set of behaviors that participants use to focus the exchange on their own self-interest rather than the shared objective. This post emphasizes the role of these behaviors in advancing a narcissist's sense of self-importance. Available here and by RSS on October 4.
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