No, Empowerment Does Not Create Conflict

I call it the “Baby with Bathwater Syndrome” (BWBS). Many of the objections I have heard to empowering teams, especially against self-directed teams, come from some example the objector raises of a team or company where it didn’t work. Then I start asking questions. Did the teams create charters, and the most vital components thereof? Were they given measurable goals to accomplish, into which they had input? Were they given enough authority and resources to accomplish the tasks assigned, including people, training, equipment and supplies? Did they…? Did they…?

Most often the answer to each is, “I don’t know.” When the person does know, I can point out several or many things the managers did wrong in implementing empowerment. Either way, the objector had thrown the baby—empowerment, which is consistently shown in studies to do good things—out with the dirty bathwater of mistakes. Instead those mistakes could have provided information to help empower the objector’s teams correctly.

This week’s research reflects one of the frequent objections I hear, that empowered teams end up arguing so much, nothing gets done. The assumption is that empowerment caused the arguing. The fact that many empowered teams do not result in gridlock illustrates that empowerment is not the direct cause of the arguing, but this study provides better evidence.

Researchers first conducted an experiment using college students in China and the United States who answered questionnaires about written scenarios involving a task force. Facts about the task force were changed for different people to compare the impact of certain factors. Then the scientists surveyed leaders and their team members in the working world using similar questions. The end results the scientists looked at were three outcomes managers should like, shown here with example statements from the first study:

• Innovative behaviors—”I would probably work to implement new ideas.”
• Teamwork behaviors—”I would probably work to make sure the Task Force succeeds.”
• Turnover intentions—”I would probably think about leaving this Task Force.”

In the field study of 105 team leaders and 386 of their direct reports, leaders’ ratings of their team members’ behaviors replaced self-reported statements for the first two. All of the second study’s wordings were changed to refer to the worker’s job. The first study was small, more of a pilot test, so I will focus on the second. That said, both in the lab and in the field, team empowerment was linked to the level of connection members felt with the teams and their senses of personal empowerment. In both studies higher levels of all correlated with lower desire to quit their jobs, and personal empowerment or connection was linked to the likelihood of innovation and teamwork.

The correlation between empowered leadership and personal conflict showed when one was higher, the other was lower (–0.35). We can’t say whether an empowered leadership style led to lower conflict, or lower conflict made leaders more likely to adopt an empowered style. But we can definitely say empowerment did not cause conflict. An empowered style also correlated with higher innovation and teamwork behaviors. Of course, teams with higher levels of conflict were less likely to enjoy the positive effects of empowerment.

Individuals who were more group-oriented than individual-oriented (more “collectivist”) were less influenced by the leader’s empowerment style. However, whether a team or leader was Chinese or American or mixed did not impact the data, and the various factors were related in the same ways. To repeat a theme from previous posts, people are more alike than different.

I should note that the study’s emphasis was on the interactions between all of the variables mentioned here. Some of the findings are too new and preliminary to act on. The “actionable” information for you, because it agrees with earlier studies, is that conflict is usually lower in empowered teams but reduces the positive effects of empowerment when present. “Managers who encounter moderate to high levels of relationship conflict in their work teams should thus seek to mitigate its effects on employees by developing a cohesive and supportive team environment among team members,” the study article says. My free SuddenTeams™ Expert System has a list of ideas for dealing with conflict in teams.

BWBS has its origins in at least two biases that infect our rational thought, from a list I’ve mentioned before: “Illusory correlation,” the false belief that two factors are linked when they are not; and the “law of small numbers,” the incorrect assumption that personal experiences or examples you’ve heard reflect the way things usually work. People who have seen conflicts or other problems in empowered teams assume empowerment caused the problems, when in fact other factors independent of empowerment caused them. And, they assume that because the empowered teams they know about had problems, most empowered teams have problems. As this study illustrates, neither is true. Based on my personal experiences with empowered teams, I could have stated 11 years ago they usually outperform those where the bosses make most of the decisions. Still, I did research to confirm what I thought was true—research that proved me wrong on other things, I’ll add. To touch on another theme, the scientists were forced by their data to admit they were wrong about some ideas they had going into the study.

This leads to another bias that is the biggest problem in implementing an empowered leadership style. “Information avoidance” is defined in the list as, “People’s tendency to avoid information that might cause mental discomfort or dissonance.” Every manager I have met who thought he or she had empowered their team really had not. None had asked for objective help to question their belief.

Action Item: If you believe you have an empowered team, and have the courage to put that to the test, call me for a free and frank conversation.

Source: Chen, G., et al. (2011), “Motivating and Demotivating Forces in Teams: Cross-Level Influences of Empowering Leadership and Relationship Conflict,” Journal of Applied Psychology 96(3):541–557.