The Attributes of High-performing Teams

An evidence review of the scientific literature on team performance

Think about the team you work in or a team you manage.

• How is your team composed in terms of people, their skills backgrounds and personalities?

• What does it feel like to interact with your team colleagues, do you trust each other and communicate well?

• How do you work together as a team, do you share information well and solve problems together? Do you have clear team goals?

People’s experiences working in teams in the corporate world are usually quite mixed. On occasion, we may have experienced working in a cohesive autonomous team with high levels of camaraderie, trust, and dependability and a common meaningful goal to pursue. But we’re fortunate to have that experience.

Mostly, people experience the difficult dysfunctions of awkwardly rubbing along together, barely tolerating each other’s idiosyncrasies, trying somehow to deliver against an impossible or ambiguous goal - only to be moved into another team just as things started to gel. People are often grouped arbitrarily with little thought given to the underlying team structures, their primary purpose, and the importance of nurturing the right dynamics. 

This article offers some highlight summaries of a 2023 ‘evidence review’ of a large number of studies looking at the characteristics of high-performing teams.

The evidence review 

The evidence review was conducted by the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa), written by Eric Barends, Denise Rousseau and Iulia Cioca, and commissioned by Novartis to offer a comprehensive review of the scientific literature regarding the attributes of effective teams and the efficacy of interventions to improve team performance.

The study, published in May 2023, used a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA¹) methodology, looking at 70 high-quality studies to address questions about team composition, effectiveness, measurement and interventions.

Explore the analysis in the downloadable PDF here: https://www.cipd.org/en/knowledge/evidence-reviews/high-performing-teams/ 

Notable Findings

• Diversity can have a negative impact on performance

• Long-lived teams with a strong identity and social cohesion drive performance

• Virtual teams need more nurturing to foster strong interpersonal dynamics

• Trust and psychological safety are key to high performance

• Clear team goals are really important

• And notably, the enabling influence of ‘Team Reflexivity’, ‘the extent to which members overtly reflect on the team’s goals, collaboration, decision-making processes, internal communications and so on’.

More about these findings in this article. 

Categorisations used

The study categorised the findings across three main dimensions:

1. Team Composition

2. Socio-affective states

3. Cognitive states

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1. Team composition

The first dimension is team composition - what kind of people make up the team.

Diversity and team performance

Contrary to popular narratives, demographic diversity is revealed by the study to have only a small, and sometimes negative, effect on team performance. Demographic diversity would include age, gender, ethnicity, religion, functional background, educational background, organisational tenure, and experience. This of course challenges the notion that diverse teams are inherently more effective, and instead, the research suggests that cognitive and psychological factors play a much more significant role in team performance.

The report suggests that diversity is one of the most researched attributes of effective teams, citing 8 meta-analyses with a combined sample size of 2,000 teams which were considered in this study. This would point to a strong validity around the findings of the impact of diversity on team performance. 

Discussions around diversity can be emotionally charged as there are many deep social, philosophical and ethical aspects to the discussion. It’s important to bear in mind that ‘team performance’ isn’t the only thing worth caring about within this complex and nuanced world and diversity by its nature is a multi-dimensional topic with deep implications.

Personality traits involved in team performance

Of the Big 5 personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion), only Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were found to have a positive correlation with team performance. This is understandable as:

a) Conscientiousness relates to dependability, orderliness, and an achievement orientation; 

b) Agreeableness is key to collaboration and cooperation.

I am surprised not to have seen Openness as a key factor because curiosity and experimentation are key to growth, learning and innovation. It’s also interesting that Extraversion wasn’t a significant factor and it’s encouraging that teams probably do well with a balance across this spectrum.

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2. Socio-affective states

The second dimension is the socio-affective states. What is it like to work in this team, and how do I feel when I am interacting with my colleagues?

Trust and psychological safety

In terms of interpersonal dynamics, I’m not surprised to see that research emphasises the importance of intra-team trust and psychological safety.

Intra-team trust is positively related to performance and team trust is most critical for virtual teams and in situations of high task interdependency, authority differentiation, skill differentiation and/or team temporality (how long members have been working together).

Two types of trust are distinguished:

• Cognition-based trust – a team member’s cognitive assessment of the reliability, integrity and competence of their colleagues

• Affect-based trust – the emotional evaluation of the reliability, integrity and competence of colleagues.

The influence of group-level psychological safety, closely related to intra-team trust, was also included in the study. The primary difference between trust and psychological safety is described by Amy Edmondson: psychological safety concerns a belief about a group norm, whereas trust concerns a belief that one person has about another.

The study cites a large meta-analysis of over 5,000 teams from 136 studies indicating that psychological safety has a moderate to large impact on team performance. Probably the best-known study in software engineering is Google’s project Aristotle which concluded that psychological safety was the number one factor in team efficacy at Google.

“It is important that people… can speak up or take action without being embarrassed, rejected or punished”

- High-performing teams, an evidence review. Practice summary and recommendations, CIPD - May 2023

Team identification, social cohesion and employee turnover

The report describes social cohesion as ‘feelings of friendship, caring and closeness among team members, and enjoyment of each other’s company’ and its positive influence on team performance aligns with the emphasis on ‘long-lived teams’ in software engineering where people have a strong feeling of inclusion, being accepted and valued for their unique characteristics.

Turnover, as would be expected, is disruptive to social cohesion and team identification, and needs to be carefully managed to bring about high-performance teams.

Virtual Teams and Interpersonal Dynamics

In terms of remote or hybrid working, the report suggests that the same interpersonal dynamic factors are important in influencing performance, but cautions that more work is needed for remote teams to establish these traits - a lesson for remote leadership not to take team dynamics for granted and to dedicate more time in assessing and nurturing the conditions for the emergence of trust, psychological safety, social cohesion, and team identification.

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3. Cognitive states

The third dimension is the team's cognitive states. How do we organise information, how do we share knowledge and work things out together?

Team cognition and reflexivity

The report suggests that ‘Team Cognition’, particularly information-sharing, ‘Transactive Memory Systems’ and ‘Cognitive Consensus’, has a large positive impact on team performance. 

Some of these terms need a little unpacking. 

Team cognition

The term ‘Team Cognition’ is new to me. The researchers describe it as an ‘emergent state that refers to the way knowledge important to team functioning is cognitively organised, represented and distributed within the team’ - so ‘documentation and knowledge sharing’ as per the terms we use in engineering teams.

The team’s collective memory

‘Transactive Memory Systems’ (TMS)  within a team refers to ‘a form of knowledge embedded in the team’s collective memory. This collective memory works like an indexing system that tells members who knows what’ - so this is all about knowing who holds the institutional knowledge and the social leverage needed to access it. Something to consider when moving people between teams, or when applying short-termist ‘hire and fire’ mentalities.

Cognitive consensus

‘Cognitive Consensus’ refers to the ‘similarity among group members regarding how key issues are defined and conceptualised’ - so that’s another word for ‘talking the same language’ or ‘reading from the same script’.

Team learning and reflexivity

Surprisingly for me, the report suggests that ‘Team Learning’ is not an important contributory factor in team performance. Team Learning is described as involving ‘behaviours such as asking questions, challenging assumptions and discussing errors or unexpected outcomes’. However, the report does advocate for a variation on Team Learning which is referred to as Team Reflexivity which is described as ‘the extent to which members overtly reflect on the team’s goals, collaboration, decision-making processes, internal communications and so on’. It goes on to suggest that without this reflexivity, teams lose the positive effects of information-sharing, a shared memory system and cognitive consensus. 

Engineering teams versed in Agile approaches will do regular retrospectives, but these can become stale and performative through repetition and passive engagement. Perhaps they can be enhanced through deliberate reflexivity.

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Conclusions and implications for managing teams

Research into the attributes of effective teams is a significant area of study within industrial and organisational psychology. This comprehensive review of high-quality studies suggests that the effectiveness of teams is less about their composition and more about the development of socio-affective and cognitive states. Key socio-affective states include trust, psychological safety, and social cohesion, while cognitive states encompass cognitive consensus, information sharing, and the transactive memory system.

Effect sizes

The review provides an overview of the minimal and maximal effect sizes for various factors influencing team effectiveness. Here is a list of factors ranked by the midway point in the minimal/maximal effect size:

• Group goal setting: d = 0.55/1.2

• Psychological safety: ρ = 0.40/0.50

• Debriefing/reflection: d = 0.30/0.70

• Teamwork training: ρ = 0.35/0.55

• Cognitive consensus: ρ = 0.40

• Transactive memory system: ρ = 0.30/0.50

• Information sharing: ρ = 0.30/0.50

• Social cohesion: ρ = 0.20/0.60

• Team trust: ρ = 0.30/0.40

• Teambuilding: ρ = 0.25/0.45

• Team diversity:  ρ = −0.05/0.10

• Personality: ρ = −0.20/0.25

Note: The symbol ‘ρ’ or ‘rho’ represents a correlation coefficient, which measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables. The symbol ‘d’ refers to Cohen’s d, a way to understand the magnitude of an effect in terms of standard deviations.

Moderators and interventions

The findings highlight several important moderators that can influence team effectiveness. These include interdependency, virtuality, team size, reflexivity, identification, authority, turnover, and temporality.

Interventions such as team building, team training, team debriefing (retrospectives), and team goal setting have been shown to positively impact the development of socio-affective and cognitive states, ultimately enhancing team performance. This underscores the importance of organisational culture and the critical role of managers and team coaches in cultivating a thriving team environment and proactively implementing interventions to boost team effectiveness

Caveats regarding measurement and models

An important caveat in this kind of research is that for most models of team effectiveness, the underlying research is inadequate to establish reliability and validity. This highlights the need for more rigorous studies in this area and suggests that practitioners should be cautious about relying too heavily on existing models without critical evaluation.

The report draws attention to the ‘emergent states’ that are experienced by members of the team. The role of emergence is important as a team is a constantly changing and evolving entity. This is why attempts to measure teams, team culture and ‘socio-affective states’ can only ever be a proxy for the ever-changing social dynamics of teamwork - ‘this measureless universe where my adventure takes place’, as described by Albert Camus in his ‘Myth of Sisyphus’.

Final thought

There are no checklist rules or absolute playbooks for working in teams, and managing teams - it’s an ever-evolving experience of our ‘interbeing’ in a complex adaptive system. The notes and findings from any study of human nature should inform our decisions and actions but never instruct them. Let’s always remember that we are human, even (or especially) in the workplace.

Footnote: What is an REA (Rapid Evidence Assessment) methodology?

1. REAs use a specific research methodology to identify the most relevant studies on a specific

topic as comprehensively as possible, and to select appropriate studies based on explicit criteria. Conventional literature reviews give an overview of the scientific literature on a topic but may have low trustworthiness due to unclear criteria for inclusion and the biases of the researchers when selecting literature.  With an REA approach, the quality of the study is independently assessed using explicit criteria for the suitability of inclusion. So, in contrast to a conventional literature review, an REA is transparent, verifiable and reproducible, significantly reducing the likelihood of bias.