In a world where so much of our performance at work is conducted in a team, it can be extremely challenging to square that with performance assessments that usually judge our individual contributions. Research from the University of Michigan attempts to help managers hone in on our key contributions during assessments.

The study suggests that managers often pay attention to the changes in team performance according to which team members happen to be present on any given day.

“Theoretically, there’s a longstanding problem in economics about how you evaluate individuals when all you see is the product of their teamwork,” the researchers explain. “There’s a classic paper, Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization, that talks about something as simple as two people moving cargo onto a truck. Their supervisor might be able to see how much has been loaded at the end of the day, but it’s going to be very hard to have a precise estimate of exactly how much each person helped with that task. That’s puzzled academics for quite a while.”

Measuring teamwork

To explore the matter more, the researchers worked with a US manufacturing company that keeps detailed productivity data. The hypothesis being tested was that managers instinctively pay attention to presenteeism and use that to distinguish individual performance within each team.

“This is a place that keeps their production lines humming 24/7, and often people have to switch teams,” they explain. “They do rotations for learning purposes, and sometimes people are absent and you’ve got to pull somebody in from another line.”

This situation allows managers to easily see whether productivity changes when certain team members are there or whether they’re away on training.

“Supervisors actually pay attention to how the work is done and who is doing the work, and they’re very attuned to nuances about shifts in team membership,” the researchers continue.

Gauging performance

The ability of each manager to gauge the changes in team membership and the impact this had on performance was then measured. A measure was created of both team productivity and individual presence, with this then compared with the performance appraisal each employee received. The results showed that managers were actually quite good at distinguishing individual performance.

“Without doing all of this math, the supervisors came up with a not perfectly accurate, but pretty accurate, estimate of who’s pulling their weight in the team,” the researchers explain.

Indeed, the managers were most accurate in their performance appraisals for employees who had a degree of influence on the performance of their team. They were similarly effective at judging the performance of employees who rotated between teams.

Best performance

The researchers believe a number of key takeaways emerged from their study. Firstly, rotating employees among teams can help to identify their individual contributions, and this is particularly effective for lower-authority workers.

It’s important to note, however, that these rotations could make it explicit to employees that managers are trying to suss them out, so they might try to game the system in some way.

The researchers also note that their work was conducted in a manufacturing setting, so more work would be needed to see how or whether it applied in knowledge-based environments.

“It would be wonderful if we could obtain the kind of data that we have about fine-grained production at the team level to understand how this plays out with different types of work,” they conclude. “If we get into work that is harder to measure, this kind of process is actually more important.”