After the heavily disrupted sporting year in 2020, 2021 has offered up a glut of competitions, from the Euro and Copa America football tournaments to the Tour de France and Olympics.  It has seemingly been a non-stop stream of sporting events to enjoy.  The events provide a never-ending insight into the joys of success, and the despair of defeat.

Of course, success and failure are not confined to the sporting world, and new research from INSEAD explores how they affect our performances at work.  The researchers argue that the key to success in any team is the ability to work together free from tension, and the best way to be free from tension is having a past record of success to fall back on.

Building on past success

While the standard mantra in the stock market is that past performance is not an indication of future success, the study found that where teams were concerned, it was crucial in determining the relational tension between team members, which in turn underpinned their ultimate success.

The researchers teamed up with a German hospital to examine how surgical teams functioned in the removal of gastrointestinal tumors. The procedures were undertaken by pairs of doctors, each of whom completed a questionnaire that revealed how they felt working with their partner.  The fact that the pairings were not explicitly chosen by the doctors themselves gave a randomized element to proceedings.

Generally speaking, surgical procedures that are completed faster tend to be more successful as it reduces the risk of complications emerging for the patient.  Faster operations also mean that the surgeon is able to help more patients, while they also improve the efficiency of the hospital.  As a result, the researchers used the duration of the operation as a proxy for the performance of the team.

Tense teams

The results underlined the crucial role tension plays in the success of the surgical teams.  It emerged that if one of the surgeons felt tense working with the other, the impact on the performance of the pair was significant.  Indeed, this was reinforced in qualitative analysis afterwards, in which the surgeons would often volunteer unprompted the tensions that undermined their performance.

The authors argue that when we evaluate a past experience, we aren’t doing so via the average of how we felt during it but rather the peak emotions and those we felt when the activity ended.  Of course, this peak emotion could be both positive and negative.

In the research, the most recent experience was irrelevant as there was a two-month variation in the timing of data collection, so the researchers looked instead at the peak experience of the two surgeons.  This analysis revealed that the past performance of the surgeons when working together appeared to be hugely important.

A good team

For instance, when past surgeries had gone well, this resulted in less tension between the pair when working together again, which in turn resulted in more successful operations.  This past track record was found to be overwhelmingly the most important factor in predicting the emotional tone of the relationship between the two surgeons, and ultimately their success as a team.

During the interviews, the surgeons very rarely mentioned events outside of the operating theater as a trigger for any tensions, suggesting that all frictions originated in the operating room itself.  The findings reinforce the significant literature on the benefits of providing a psychologically safe workplace that allows people to work without fear.  Such an environment, therefore, helps people to perform to their maximum.

As such, managers may want to try to identify teams that have had success in the past and build on that success by pairing them together more often on future projects.  If teams have no track record then the emphasis could turn to ensure that tensions are reduced as much as possible.