La Mannschaft - team spirit & cooperation at work

54, 74, 90, 2014: Germany is World Soccer Champion again! Teams with such ingenious individualists like Neymar or Ronaldo had no chance against “our 23“.

Team spirit seems to promote cooperative behaviour and thus also performance. This is not only true for soccer but also for work. The research trio John List (University of Chicago), Uri Gneezy (University of California) and Andreas Leibbrandt (Monash University) compared two fishing villages in the World Cup host country Brazil regarding their team spirit. One village is close to a lake. Every fisher can go fishing on his own little boat. The other village is close to the ocean, where small boats are rather unsuitable due to the heavy swell. The fishermen therefore form groups and go fishing together on bigger boats.
The three behaviour economists had the fishermen from both villages perform the well-known ultimatum game: One fisher gets a certain amount of money and has to decide which portion of this he will pass onto a second (not visible) player. The money will only be paid out if the second player agrees with his share of the money. It was revealed that the “group fishermen“ offered almost 40% and the “single fishermen“ less than 30% of the total amount. Economists concluded that the type of workplace organisation strongly influences the cooperation of team members in everyday life.
Many sectors have recognised this new current of thought. In the industrial branch creative team work instead of monotonous assembly line work is in the focus.

Agility and accompanying management methods such as scrum are being successfully applied. Lastly, these trends confirm research: Structure working conditions as such, that people have to cooperate with each other.
Also interesting in this context is another aspect: Different performance standards of team members lead to an increased productivity, since the less performing ones are motivated by the stronger ones. However, this does not always work, which brings us back to the World Cup: Teams with big performance gaps such as Brazil or Portugal were less successful. A lack of team spirit and consequently a lack of cooperation surely were a decisive factor for this. What do we learn from this for everyday working life:

1. Working conditions are to be structured as such that cooperation is possible and necessary.

2. Those performing less can be ”pulled along“ by the stronger ones, if there is sufficient team spirit.

And regarding the Neymars and Ronaldos: In the future we also do not want to do without your dribbling. But don't start cooperating with your teammates.