Voluntarily formed teams perform better than alternatives
The way teams are formed in business today is not likely to yield the best results, and also leads to lower job satisfaction.
There is quite a lot of evidence for women’s aversion to highly competitive work environments, and women seem to perform less well when stuck in such workplaces. So, it begs the question: in what environments do women do well, if testosterone-saturated stress factories fail to engage them? Are women naturally more cooperative than men, more altruistic and less hierarchically-inclined? Is it somehow related to women being less advantageous inequity-averse (being more accepting of their partner making more money than them)?
New research from Peter Kuhn and Marie Claire Villareal sets about to explore those questions, and comes down with some fairly clear results. The basic structure of the research was to offer the alternative of solitary work and pay versus cooperative work and pay. And there the gender difference immediately appeared: men are much more likely to opt for solitary work, and women, cooperative work.
As the authors state,
While it might be tempting to imagine that women are disproportionately attracted to cooperative environments because they tend to…
