Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”
Michael Jordan
Carron (1982) defines team cohesion as “a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its goals and objectives” in other words the ability of a team to come together and remain cohesive in achieving their common goal no matter what challenges they are faced with.
Groups and teams share similar charteristics. They are both a collection of people who share a common goal and have a shared interest. An example of this would be accountants, who work in an office; they have shared interest of doing the same type of job in an equal setting as their colleagues. The key difference and what separates the two is that a team must, if it wishes to be successful, interact with and depend on the other members of the team to achieve its goal of winning a championship.
This answer will look in detail at the characteristics of a team, the internal factors and external factors that affect a team’s ability to become cohesive or indeed stay cohesive, for example the size of the team, whether the sport is co-active or interactive, the effect of infighting or a bad result may have on the team and social loafing.
It will also examine the positives and negatives of Tuckmans (1965) Linear group team model that explains that a team comes together through a set of stages; forming, norming, storming and performing as well as Carron’s (1984) Pendulum Model for team cohesion, which explains cohesion as a dynamic process that swings back and forth..This answer will also assess whether team cohesion leads to greater performance and is an important factor in a team winning or losing.
Before we can look at if indeed Team Cohesion affects performance we must first look at what a team is. Kremer and Moran (2008) argues that a team is made up of five characteristics those being interaction, structure, cohesion, identity and the goals of the team.
They theorized that the cohesion aspect is multi dimensional between social (meaning how a team gets on off the pitch) and task (meaning how well a team plays together to achieve its goal of winning). A good example of a team who not only met all five of those characteristics but excelled in them would be the 2004 Boston Red Sox.
In Seth Mnookin’s (2006) book, Feeding the Monster about the 2004 Red Sox he points out that they were a very close knit unit that rallied around the mantra of Pitcher Curt Schilling “why not us” a simple question that asked his team mates why could they not become World Series champions. Schilling got every member of the Team a t-shirt with that slogan, a shirt all the team wore through the playoffs. Mnookin also noted that at times during the season it looked like the Red Sox were “communicating in some sort of goofy sign language that involved lots of fist thumping and pointing at the sky” and only really started to take off later in the season when they embraced their identity as self professed idiots.
The turning Point Came on July 31st of that year when the team traded star shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra from the team. Mnookin notes that Nomar was unhappy with the team and threatened to sit out the last two months of the season, causing distraction in the locker room. After a clear-the-air meeting failed between both sides Mnookin quotes team President Larry Luccino as saying “by that point there was a high degree of alienation on Nomar’s part from the team”.
In exchange for Garciaparra the Red Sox got Orlando Cabrera, a player of lesser skill then Graciappara. According to the Baseball Reference website, Garciaparra is a career .313 hitter while Cabrera is a career .274 hitter. But Cabrera fitted in seamlessly with the club. The book shows that Cabrera created indivdual handshakes for every member of the team that he would use whenever a particular player made a good fielding play or got a hit.
Statistics (Baseball Reference) show that with Garciaparra the Red Sox had 56 victories to 46 losses and would not have qualified for the playoffs. After Garciappara they went 46-18, qualified for the playoffs and ultimately became Champions.
Kremer and Moran(2008) argue that sports that are interactive i.e., sports that require co-ordination between team members like football to advance up the pitch (you must pass the ball to a teammate to break down the defensive wall) need a higher level of team cohesion than a sport that is co – active. In a sport like golf, for example in the Ryder cup ,the golfers while in a team setting play their own shot and they do not need a teammate to aid them.
But it can be said that the above example dispels this notion and that team cohesion is important in all sports. Baseball is a unique mixture of the co-active and interactive but it is a primarily a co-active sport. Batting is co-active and while some elements of fielding are interactive. As seen above the Red Sox did not realize their true potential until they became a more cohesive unit when they got rid of star player Garciapparra for another player of lesser talent that fitted in better in terms of getting on with team mates.
Others who disagree with the idea of cohesion being essential to performance may use another Baseball example of the 1977-78 New York Yankees, a team famously dubbed the Bronx Zoo according to Jonathan Mahler (2005) in his book the Bronx is burning. A team that despite a volatile manager in Billy Martin and a bullying owner, George Steinbrenner, won back to back World Series led by star player, Reggie Jackson, who famously got into a fist fight with Martin on June 28th 1977 in a game against the Red Sox.
Ron Guidry, a pitcher on the team, notes in the same book however that that time period was the best time of his career. Which suggest that despite the infighting and volatile nature of the clubhouse it was a bond not unlike one shared by survivors of accidents, that while not cohesive in a stereotypical way the team still was cohesive after going through such a unique experience as a team. While their social cohesion was weak their task cohesion was very strong.
Moran and Kremer (2008) suggest in their book that in extreme circumstances chaos in a team is not always a bad thing and that sometimes it can even spur on players in the team.
Another anecdotal example of this would be in the TV show Hard Knocks, (2010) New York Jets head coach, Rex Ryan, wanted to spur on one of his players, Vernon Goldstein, so he arranged for this player to get into a fight with a bigger player on the team to drive him on.
Moran and Kremer (2008) also points out that by allowing conflict in a team encourages the team to express ideas and opinions. They argue that a team that is fully supportive of each other will fall into what they call group thinking.
Teams that suffer from group thinking and that are too afraid to disagree suffer as they underperform and it can have a negative effect on individual talent as no one player wants to stand out and disagree for fear of a backlash from the team.
This idea is similar to the idea of social loafing. The concept as Moran and Kremer (2008) explain is when a team, bonded by a common goal, does not perform as well collectively as it would as individuals given the same task. Sometimes members of a team will not try as hard in a team setting as opposed to an individual setting. Players won’t try as hard if they know they won’t get the recognition.
A study in America done by Rune Høigaard and Rolf P. Ingvaldsen (2006) on the sport of floor ball found that the players reported greater effort and a reduction in their social loafing when they were recognised for their efforts. The study even finds that athletes who are highly skilled and highly motivated suffer from social loafing also only to be re-motivated by their individual performance being identified.
It can then be theorized that a current example of social loafing is the Miami Heat. This Basketball club in the offseason signed Lebron James and Chris Bosh to go along with star player, Dwayne Wade.
Wade, Lebron and Bosh are considered by basketball experts as three of the top twenty players in the game and in the case of Wade and Lebrons two of the top five.
Yet they got off to a sluggish start and won 9 games and lost eight although have rebouned lately. It can be said that because they are the three main players on the Heat and were the stars on their previous teams that they are suffering from social loafing as they were no longer individuals heaped with praise for a team win as the outstanding player. Instead they are now just another guy on a superstar team. And thus may not be trying as hard.
Research on the subject of team cohesion is usually done through individual questionnaires. The most popular model of these measures has become the Group Environment Questionnaire .This is based on the concept of Caron, Widemeyer and Brawley (1985) which broke cohesion down into four different sections;
Group integration, task, social and an individual’s attraction to group. Group integration means how a team member views the closeness of the team overall, While individual attraction measures what makes them participate and want to stay a member of the team. The questionnaire asks the participations eighteen different questions broken into the above sections and asking members to rank on a scale of one to nine whether they agree or disagree with statements.
Carron, Colman, Wheeler and Stevens (2002) carried out a study which shows that cohesion has a large effect on performance, that how cohesive a team was had a direct link with how a team performed. They also found that both task and social cohesion affected performance. This is in contrast to Mullen and Cooper (1994) that summarised that task cohesion was more important and that in essence it was a waste of time for team to do team building exercises.
However, researchers point out that there is no one way to truly measure the effect cohesion has on a team’s performance for empirical evidence. Widemeyer, Carron and Brawley (2002) say that there is no theoretical or conceptual model that can be used to measure cohesiveness.
Murdak (1989) argues that while cohesion measures groups it is hard to measure as a whole. While the GEQ is the most reliable test Dion (2002) argues it does not measure the group as a whole. How an individual may feel personally towards his playing time may not affect how he interacts with the group. He may be personally unhappy but it does not affect the group as they may not express their unhappiness outwardly and thus have no effect on team chemistry at all.
It can be argued that another flaw in the way cohesion in a team is measured is that while all the researchers on this topic agree that team cohesion is a dynamic process meaning it is ever changing, for example a team could have good cohesion after a comprehensive victory or an important win whereas their cohesion may be low after a loss. Only one study has been done on a team through a season and that was by Holt and Sparkes (2001) who documented a university football team in the United States and how it changed over the year.
In that study Holt and Sparkes found that when the team was eliminated from a tournament they as a collective revised their goals to focus on winning other tournaments
External factors can have a huge effect on a team’s cohesion both positive and negative. As mentioned above it is a commonly held belief that while a loss is detrimental to a team’s cohesion a win can also be equally detrimental.
Basketball coach, Pat Reilly, believes that winning for teams that experience sudden success could cause members of the team to become more focused on themselves. Despite a team win some members will be unhappy unless they get all the credit. Riley relays his own personal experience when he was coach of the LA Lakers in the 1980’s in his book, winning from within; players became more invested in trying to take credit for winning the championship and establishing themselves as the alpha dog of the team. Riley says that star player, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, worked harder then ever in the offseason and came back in the best shape of his life. His main goal was to establish himself as the best player on the team and not the winning of the championship. His wish to get all the credit for the team’s success caused the locker room to divide into cliques and ultimately led to the departure of Jabbar from the team. Riley calls this theory “the disease of me” when the team gets more focused on the me instead of the we.
However cliques can be considered either a good or a bad thing. Weinberg and Gould view cliques as bad, noting that it only benefits the few who are in the clique while alienating the rest of the team.
Dr Katie Gentile, a psychologist, in a videotaped interview for American radio station PBS, suggested that cliques can also be
She found that a clique like a family .It lets members experiment with different identties and find who you they are and what theyare good at. It can be argued then that cliques can also cause teammates to become close to one another in the face of adversity.
The structure of the team may also affect how together a team is. For instance, the number of players in the group may affect the cohesion. A smaller group of players like a basketball squad for instance which has a 15 man roster is easier to control then a rugby squad which has 25 players who are further fragmented into forwards and backs.
New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichik, in a recent interview detailed how he dealt with a larger group. In American football the roster of the team is 53 players. To makes sure his message is getting through and that all the players and staff are on the same page Belichick uses techniques such as regular meetings with the captain of each unit to get them to help relay his message and goals for the team back to the other players. He also likes to have a smaller coaching staff because “it's easier for me to communicate with a smaller group of coaches and get us all on the same page, rather than have 25 assistants and for us to all get on the same page, then get all the players on that same page”
All the above agreements would support the Carron model of team cohesion which is more of a dynamic model of cohesion rather than the Tuckman model which is more rigid.
Tuckman (1965) believes that every team goes through the following stages as follows;
Forming, when a team gets together for the first time,
Storming, the process in which the team comes together exchanges ideas on how to tackle the challenges that faces them;
Norming when team members start to fall into roles in the team both informal and formal and have their own code of rules and ethics. An example of a team’s rules is when Dallas Cowboys rookie wide receiver, Dez Bryant, refused to take part in the traditional rookie hazing from veteran players on the team. As a punishment Bryant had to take all the players out for dinner. The players ordered everything on the menu and left Bryant with a bill for 55,000 dollars.
Performing, where the team is now in theory a cohesive unit and is able to bring everything together and win.
Tuckman believes that whenever a new player comes aboard that the team must start a new and begin the process from the first stage again.
Moran and Kremer disagree with this model. They argue that this model fails to consider what happens after the stages of development. Moran and Kremer propose the introduction of a new stage called Waving, a more dynamic stage that would allow a team to deal with conflict, infighting, and poor team morale after a bad result within the set structure of the team i.e. those rules drawn up in the norming stage.
Carron’s theory therefore lends itself more to the idea of team dynamics. In his model, Carron believes that team cohesion is like a pendulum that swings back and forth and is always dynamic depending on what a team is facing.
Conclusion
While there is no one generally accepted method for calculating the true value of cohesion on a team’s performance it can be said that the above evidence supports the idea that cohesion lends itself to greater team performance. A team that is together will be willing to try harder and perform better if they are having fun and like their teammates as opposed to a team that is in an unhappy environment. While there are exceptions to the rule in most instances successful teams must have either a strong sense of task or social cohesion if it wants to reach its fullest potential.
