Teams that Identify, Use Real Experts Perform Better

Researcher Stuart Bunderson of Washington University in St. Louis wrote in a study report, "groups seem to perform better and make better decisions when members share an accurate understanding of one another's expertise…" But where does that understanding come from? And how do other traits of the group work with that understanding to affect the group's performance?

Bunderson observed and surveyed 35 self-directed "production teams of a manufacturing facility in a Fortune 100 high-technology firm" in the U.S. to find out, and then asked shift supervisors and engineering managers to rate the teams' performances. He focused on two sets of "cues" that people might (rightly or wrongly) use to judge whether someone is an expert:

• Experience cues: years of company experience, technical certification, formal education, and industry experience outside the company
• Personal cues: gender and race/ethnicity

When experience cues are ignored, personal cues were enough to create expertise ratings: for example, when both people had no experience, a female in a racial minority group was 6.6 times less likely to be seen as an expert than a white male. The good news is, experience cues were much more powerful: that zero-experience white male was 140 times less likely to be seen as an expert than an experienced minority female with technical certification.

Teams who allowed in-team experts to sway their decisions performed better than those which did not. But many of these findings bring a messy reality to the process:

• The newer a team was, the stronger a role personal cues played (presumably because members were less likely to know about the experience and training of each member).
• Even though they were not managers or team leaders, people assigned "coordinator" roles were given higher expertise ratings just by virtue of their positions.
• Newer teams, and teams that gave a few members more than their share of influence over decisions, gave more weight to personal cues instead of experience cues. More mature teams who spread around the influence were smarter about choosing expertise based on experience.
• Teams that allowed people with more experience to influence more decisions performed better than those that:
• • did not recognize the real (experienced) experts on the team, and/or
  • rely on those experts during decision-making
• In this set of teams, those with 9-10 members gained better performance ratings than those smaller or larger.

Source: Bunderson, J.S. (03), "Recognizing and Utilizing Expertise in Work Groups: A Status Characteristics Perspective," Administrative Science Quarterly 48:557.