Team Players and Groupthink
Inclusion and the Roots of Social Confusion
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The Group Outing
On a brisk autumn afternoon in 1990s, I was among a bevy of teenagers who piled into cars in a church parking lot and drove across San Francisco Bay to congregate in the back yard of the city’s picturesque City Hall—if you ever watched the 1978 production of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you’ve seen the exact spot, as it’s where the final horrific reveal occurs in the closing moments of the film.
It’s a broad flat area lined with close-cropped trees that were well-past dropping their leaves that season. We assembled near the base of one and received our marching orders. Over the next hour we unloaded and set up folding chairs and tables, and then (at the appointed hour), a van arrived bearing hot food in catering trays, along with steno burners to keep them warm. Nobody had thought that the city’s autumn winds would make keeping the steno lit an ongoing challenge, but somehow we managed.
Over the next two hours, we served Thanksgiving Dinner to the city’s homeless population, and then we mixed with the diners and swapped stories with them, looking for a way to lay a bit of Jesus on top of their meal.
On the trip out, during set-up, serving & mingling, and on the trip back, we were subjected to exactly what you would expect from the responsible adults leading the excursion:
Constant check-ins
Are you sure you know where the group is?
Are you comfortable?
Do you need anything?
I’m tied up, can you fetch me something?
When did we last do a head count? Never mind, it’s time to do one again.
We were a group on a trip, and we behaved like a group on a trip. None of us did more than grumble at the oversolicitous supervision—we’d all been on family road trips, on school field trips, and to berry-picking patches, and gone on our own unsupervised excursions to the beach and to Disneyland.1 There is a protocol to follow when you’re operating in a group, and there are rules.
In a group, everyone is responsible for everyone else. The group needs to stay together, so you don’t just need to do head counts. You need to see to everyone else’s frame of mind. A teenager who’s too moody is liable to stalk off out of sight, and who knows if they’ll come back (or be able to come back)? There are threats to the group, and tensions within the group, but the group’s job is to do what the group is aiming to do and get everyone home safe.
When a group is in dangerous territory, it huddles together for protection and solidarity, like zebras do when they think they’re being stalked.
When a group is under siege from the cold, its members huddle together for warmth. When a group is searching for direction, it struggles to reach consensus (and some pretty nasty political maneuvering can come into play). When a group reaches consensus, it moves as if under the direction of a hive mind. Leaders in groups are in a supremely vulnerable spot, because the group mind can—at any moment—over-ride the authority of the leader. This is how protests turn into riots without the consent of the initial “organizer.”
And, importantly, in a group, if one person has a problem, everyone has a problem. A late member delays an entire expedition. A missing member roots the group to the spot and the search for that missing member supplants whatever other purpose or direction the group had. And, in very unfavorable circumstances, members of the group are always expendable if tossing them out into the cold might ensure the safety, social coherence, or ideological unity of the group itself—cancel culture is but one recent and obvious manifestation of this universal rule.
Any time humans work near one another, in a similar activity and without a strict division of labor, they function as a group.
All of these aspects of groupishness stem from the nature of groups themselves. A group of animals (including people) united by common location and identity create an social ecosystem whereby each individual ceases to operate as an individual and identifies, instead, with the group (at least so long as that individual feels included in the group). Any time you hear someone discuss “inclusion,” they are invoking group psychology (whether they know it or not).
In nature, groupishness is a behavior exhibited primarily by the vulnerable, because it is through belonging to the group that the vulnerable individual finds power and safety.
It would follow, therefore, that powerful beings tend to operate alone…except that nature (and human history) tells a different story.
The Team Adventure
A few years after that Thanksgiving soup kitchen, a couple buddies and I got it into our heads that, with the advances in video technology, we could make a short action movie.
The idea occurred, naturally, as the result of watching a movie together. After the silver-screen adventure, we retired to a table at the Sushi Boat in the shopping center opposite the cinema to compare chopsticks and talk about the bitchin’ film we’d just seen.
Like late-night barflies, we found ourselves moving quickly from “That was so cool!” to “We could totally do that!” to commandeering some pens and scratch paper from the cashier and planning out our cinematic masterpiece.
One of us was a martial arts instructor. He was obviously going to handle the fight choreography. Another one was an artist—she would design the costumes and the props. Another of us (me) was a computer geek with theater experience—he’d direct and be responsible for all the filming, sound, and special effects. We’d each act, and we’d each serve as volunteer labor in the departments we weren’t running.
A week later, I’d written a script, Martial Arts Guy had used the skeleton script to design a few basic fights, and Art Department Chick had drawn up some prop designs, sourced some off-beat costume pieces, and found a picturesque location to shoot.
We worked for months. We practiced the sword fights and fist fights and gun fights and the stunts until we were rehearsing the moves in our dreams. I spent four months learning about Foley, film editing, and shot design, building a DIY steadicam, and sourcing cameras, tripods, and stunt equipment.
And then, after a grueling two-weekend shoot, I got to editing. A month later, we got together again to film pick-up shots. A year later, after a mind-numbing crash-course in computer graphics, visual FX, and compositing to blending them with the practical effects we filmed on set, the final product rolled off my computer and onto VCD (a janky pre-DVD form of video disc).
The three of us went on to work as a team on a couple more films, and two of us went on to use that experience as a foundational cornerstone of our careers (me as a photographer and A/V producer, Art Department Chick as a commercial artist—Martial Arts Guy went onto a career in the legitimate violence industry).
Small scale and silly though this example is, this is how a team works. A team pursues a common, directed goal—such as winning a baseball game, or producing a movie—and to achieve that goal they divide labor between themselves according to their strengths and expertise.
Because of this, team roles are not fungible (i.e. they can’t be easily exchanged one for another). On my little action movie, for example, you couldn’t have put Martial Arts Guy behind the camera, or had me design the action scenes, and neither of us could’ve done Art Department Chick’s job. Do that, and you get a shitty movie that won’t hold people’s attention. Sure, we all helped each other, and in doing so we developed overlapping areas of expertise, but that didn’t make any of us expendable or even fully-swap-able.
Every member of a team has a designated role based on their expertise.
You can see this in great fictional teams. The core four of the original Star Wars trilogy (Han, Chewie, Luke, and Leia) all hold an important and unique role in maintaining dramatic tension, all have different skills to bring to the table to solve dramatic problems, and are all indispensable in the fight against the Empire. The A Team, Star Trek, and even Harry Potter depend upon team dynamics wherein the mismatch between the strengths and qualities of the characters create a team that is greater than the sum of its parts.
This is the case with all real-world teams, as well.
Because of this, when a member of a team straggles, you can’t just get rid of him. His role is important, it must be performed. This gives him responsibility and authority, even if he’s the low guy on the totem pole. He’s the big fish in his small pond, and he can bring the whole enterprise to a stop if he feels like he’s being ill-treated.
Teams are vulnerable to disruption through ego contests, resentment, and drama, and yet they can tolerate a very high level of all of these things so long as boundaries are honored. You as director can, to pluck a thoroughly fictional example out of the aether, tell your Martial Arts Guy he’s being a fuckwit because the moves he’s planned won’t read well on the camera, and he can knock you on your ass because you’re being rude about it, but in the end no matter how rudely the director rants, the director is asking a favor of the Martial Arts Guy that will advance the aims of the team—and in asking that favor, he is showing respect for the Martial Arts Guy’s position even as he insults Martial Arts Guy’s competence on a particular point of contention.
Thus, teammates can literally come to blows over a problem and still work together productively, because the common goal and the mutual honor of each position ensures that their interests stay aligned even in the midst of spectacular conflict.
Start-up companies are teams. Some sports teams are teams.2 Marriages are teams…
But, weirdly, they are also groups.
And, even stranger, families aren’t teams at all.
Division of Labor
As anyone who’s been single for any length of time in their adulthood knows, running a household isn’t a full-time job, it’s two full time jobs (at least).
If you’re single with no dependents, it takes at least one full-time job to fund the enterprise—pay for the housing, the insurance, the car(s), the fuel and utilities, and the food—and it’s another major endeavor to maintain the household. Cleaning, cooking, scheduling, keeping the social calendar, doing the laundry, balancing the checkbook (I know, I know, nobody does this anymore), paying the bills, etc. all easily swell to consume another ten-to-twenty hours per week if you’re not exceptionally well-organized, and that’s to say nothing of the extra work involved if you have pets who need feeding, attention, and cleaning-up after.
That’s a whole second job. You work at your workplace to enable you to have a life, then you spend a good chunk of the rest of your time either maintaining that life or living with the frustration of the results of not maintaining it.
If you’re well-paid or willing to live hand-to-mouth, you can spend money (and dollars are, don’t forget, literally units of your life) to hire a professional cleaner, or a professional chef (most people do this by ordering take-out or going to restaurants), or a barista, or a lawn service, or a financial advisor, or buy software to help you manage things, or acquire a robotic slave (like a Roomba or a dishwasher). One way or another, any working adult with their own household has enough work to stretch across two jobs.
Now, add a second person to that mix. Twice as many inhabitants of the domicile doesn’t just mean a bump-up in expenses around food, it can mean more than twice the mess, as each party attempts to keep their space in the manner to which they’re accustomed, and the interface of these two styles causes unexpected explosions of chaos. Invariably, in every couple, there’s one neat-freak and one slob (these are relative terms), and the neat-freak often either winds up doing the bulk of the housework or bitching endlessly about the slob’s slobby habits (or both).
Couples that do this are acting like a group, and they usually don’t last long without literally offloading the teamwork to contractors.
Unless they learn to function as a team.
If you and your partner divide the labor between the two of you, and honor that division (both by keeping up your end of the bargain and by not trying to micromanage your partner’s end), you turn the work of maintaining a household into a team sport. It hardly matters how the labor is divided, it only matters that it is well-divided—the person who winds up with the bulk of the household responsibilities had better not also be the person who has the more onerous job or that party’s going to quickly feel ill-used. It also helps—especially when you’re feeling grumpy about your chores—to honestly observe the load your partner is carrying and remind yourself that you are a team, not a group. The goal on a team is not to be “equal,” it’s to be “effective.” If the division of labor is effective and nobody is feeling ill-used, it’s fair no matter how much effort each party is putting in.
The same logic applies to parenting duties, care and feeding of pets, and decisions about finances.
However, because the team is also in a personal relationship, all the dynamics of a group also come into play: checking in with your partner, making sure he or she feels included, finding ways to demonstrate that he or she belongs, and all the interpersonal manipulation (both fair and foul) that comes into play in group situations is front-and-center in any close interpersonal relationship.
Both elements are critical in a marriage for another reason as well:
Team members earn respect and admiration for their efforts. Group members receive affection and validation as a result of belonging. All humans need both of these things, in some measure, to feel secure and valued in their core adult relationships.
The family that proceeds from that core partnership, however, is a group that is managed by the team of the core couple.
A family can function as a team in specific contexts (family businesses, chore division, etc.) but the nature of a family is that they are occupying the same space and depending on one another for survival, rather than pursuing focused, common goals through the division of labor. Group communication ethics, consensus building, emotional caretaking and management are the order of the day, as this is the way of doing things that is most likely to keep family tensions (which can easily escalate to murderous)3 at a minimum. To this end, a family will often embed itself within other group activities (such as churches or community organizations) in order to help buttress the task of group maintenance.4
Going Crazy On You
Even having said all the above, I’ve barely done an adequate job delving into the thousands of subtle differences between teams and groups. There is, however, one big difference between teams and groups that I haven’t mentioned:
On balance, women tend to be more groupish, while men tend toward the team-ish.
Everything else you’ve heard about the differences between men and women’s social and mental inclinations fall into place when you look through this lens:
Women are more interested in people (and their relationships) than things (and their behaviors)—and of course they should be. Women, living their lives in groups, need to be extraordinarily sophisticated about relationships and interpersonal politics just to make it through grade school without a crippling case of alienation. Men, who spend the bulk of their lives on teams, need to be able to look at systems, spot weaknesses, and quickly find ways to be useful unless they want to reach middle-school as the class punching bag.
The person/thing differences in feminine and masculine cognition goes so deep that, most of the time, when women study things they bring a “relational” way of thinking to the study, while when men study people they bring a “mechanistic” way of thinking. Women studying “things” tend to be ecologists. Men studying “people” tend to be behavioral psychologists or philosophers—in other words, the men are still studying “things” and the women are still studying “people.”5
These different cognitive modes have incredible survival value. You can’t manage a tribe, or a family, or an outing into dangerous territory to do laundry/bathing/gathering if you don’t effortlessly think in “group” mode. And you can’t organize a hunt, build a cathedral, or wage war if you can’t slip automatically into “team” mode.
But this basic biological division of labor isn’t just about childcare, or about women being smaller than men so needing to keep men in line through group solidarity. This is a division of labor that proceeds from the dual nature of our species.
Predatory species—especially social predatory species,6 such as wolves and humans—operate in teams, and their young join the team the moment they are physically capable of joining the hunting party.
Prey species—especially social prey species like wildebeests and elephants and deer—operate in groups, and think in groupish ways.
The ability of humans to do both cognitive modalities is an underappreciated superpower. This two-gear mentality is right up there with the opposable thumb as far as “great evolutionary tricks that put us at the top of the food chain” go.
Historically, humans dealt with this sexed division of cognitive survival strategies by having women’s spaces, and men’s spaces, and not a lot of overlap. As previously sex-segregated social spheres integrate in the wake of economic development and feminism (both of which are ultimately driven by technological development), it gets increasingly difficult to figure out which mode one is meant to use in a given context.
Is it a team environment? In that case, co-workers or club-fellows calling each other “motherfucker,” “nigger,” “asshole,” “dickhead,” and other even more demeaning things—as well as playing grab-ass and knocking each other around—might be expected. In these environments, if someone has a problem with you, you’re going to hear about it—word might reach you first in the form of a fist to the nose, or a shout of anger, or it may come in low direct grave tones, but you won’t spend much time wondering if you pissed someone off or let someone down. Anywhere you find teams, you find this kind of behavior, because team mates need to be able to trust that, when the pinch comes, or when you fuck up and get called on it, you’re not going to collapse in a fit of pique, or self-pity, or an ego tantrum. They need to know you’ll “man up” and fight for yourself, so the whole team doesn’t have to come to your rescue unless it really is a life and death problem.
But what if you’re in a group environment? In that case, your co-workers and fellows will be overtly respectful, they’ll be sure to praise whenever the opportunity presents itself, and they’ll build you up so that you know you belong and don’t make waves with your discontent (so long as you toe the group line, whatever that is). Any nastiness is most likely to come in whisper campaigns, reputation destruction, quiet shunning, and consensus-building—the target of that nastiness will often be the last to know that it’s going on.
If you’re naturally predisposed to “group” thinking, you’re going to crave validation and affirmation—not because you’re insecure or neurotic, but because this is how you know that you are still accepted by the group.
If you’re naturally predisposed to “team” thinking, you’re going to crave accomplishment and recognition—not because you’re vain, but because these are the things that tell you that you’re bringing value to the team and are still indispensable.
“Group” ethics and “team” ethics could not be more different and still be oriented towards building and maintaining solidarity. So what happens when you start collapsing the distinctions between “group” and “team” environments?
Well, to a “team” player, a “group” person encountering the rough-n-tumble aspect of team sports often will appear weak and in need of protection. Add one “group” person to a team and they’re likely to get extra ribbing and piss-taking7 as well as extra assistance. If they’re adaptable, they’ll catch on and become part of the team. If they don’t, they’ll wash out. Either way, the team itself wins, because it’s either stronger because of a newly strengthened player, or it’s stronger because someone who couldn’t hack it has washed out.
But if you add enough “Group” people to a team in a short amount of time, the team instinct to protect and foster the newbie will eventually turn into the group instinct of making sure everyone feels included. The team will lose its ability to function with strict division of labor and high competence, and this will erode its competitive edge.
This often happens in business when a company exits the start-up phase and enters the corporate phase: there are too many people to form a cohesive team, and corporate leadership tends to favor managers who are trained in management rather than people who are experts at the mission of the team they are tasked with managing. Rare companies—like Apple under Steve Jobs—dodge this fate (for a while) because they are run by ruthlessly team-oriented people. But most don’t.
The dynamic Jobs describes in the above clip is a consequence of the fact that “professional managers” are trained in managing groups, not teams.8
Now, let’s consider things from the opposite perspective. If you have a group and a “team” person joins, his lack of familiarity with groupish ways of doing things is a danger to group solidarity. He must be brought into line through a combination of shame and affirmation, lest his maverick ways create divisions within the group—he will think of these divisions as “sub-teams,” but the group mind recognizes them for what they are: factions.
We can turn again to business for an example of this: when a big company hires a new CEO with grand visions, or a country selects a new head-of-state with revolutionary ideas, these rambunctious tendencies almost never bear substantive, long-lasting fruit. A new CEO might bring a pet product to market, a new President might push some Important Legislation through, but such moves hardly matter in the long run: the group will keep motoring along, following its own logic, impervious to the desires of the individuals within it, and responding only to external pressures like the massive superorganism it is.
If you’re a corporate person moving into the land of small-and-nimble businesses, or if you’re a woman trying to crack open a boy’s club, you’re not going to get very far without changing your thinking from “group” to “team.” Teams appear on the surface to be harsher, less forgiving environments than groups. Teams are both more individualistic and more coordinated, and they’re more directly performance-based than are groups. But they’re also more forgiving if you’re moving perceptibly towards kicking ass as a team member.
On the other hand, if you’re a father taking his kids to parent-child events, if you’re a team person looking to do well in a corporate environment, if you’re a man moving into a women-dominated space, or if you’re a revolutionary looking to turn a company (or social club, or church, or government) around, you can’t afford to think like a “team” person. You must instead cultivate the priority stack of group interaction, and understand group psychology. You have to find the parade and join it—or step in front of it and start leading it as if you’ve always been there. But you will never get anywhere steering the group unless you’re making sure that everyone else feels included and knows they belong, and you won’t hold on to power unless you pay attention to how the group mind is moving (and make sure never to oppose it directly).
The transition from Group World to Team World (and vice versa) can be a brutal one, but if you find yourself caught in such a transition, remember:
Humans are both Group and Team creatures. Somewhere in you is the capacity to code-switch between these modes…even if you first have to learn the code of the mode you’re least familiar with.
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Yeah, that’s right. When we Xers were 14-17, we would sometimes literally just pile in a friend’s car and drive the 400+ miles to Disneyland on impulse. Wanna make something of it?
Some sports, such as volleyball, are performed by groups as a result of the structure of the game. Others, such as fencing or diving, are done by squads (groups of individuals of who move in certain contexts as a power bloc/mutual support network).
As documented in such early myths as the tales of Romulus and Remus, Cain and Able, Horus and Set, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, etc.
This, by the way, is why siblings who grow up doing business together often maintain closer relationships throughout life than do families that don’t. The experience of disciplined teamwork teaches siblings the skills required to maintain relationships despite diverging values, lifestyles, and life trajectories—they are united by more than a common past and filial affection. It’s also why children pushed together by abuse, who defended each other, maintain close bonds into adulthood—they survived by functioning as a mutual defense team.
By the way, one of the reasons that those who study such matters are reasonably confident that male homosexuality has at least some biological roots is that boys who grow up to be gay men often exhibit feminine cognitive patterns from the time they’re pre-verbal. I am unfamiliar with any reciprocal literature regarding lesbians (this doesn’t mean it’s not out there, only that I haven’t run across it).
i.e. those animals that hunt in packs
A Briticism that roughly translates as “insulting or teasing someone in an overtly offensive, but usually covertly friendly, fashion”
This is, in turn, because “teams” at large companies are, in fact, groups of people who do the same job—answer phones, handle legal problems, bug-test code, sell the product, etc. All the annoying shit about modern corporate life—the pep rallies, the emotional micromanagement, HR policies, etc.—follow from this organizational reality. With rare exception, the only place you can reliably find actual, genuine, bona fide teams in large companies are on small, specialized “task forces.”
Is this useful in the "academia has become feminized" conversation?