Warmth, competence, psychological safety – it depends

I’m supposed to be reviewing some of the elements in my organisational prioritisation model that I use to describe an organisation’s architecture (outlined in The Social Organization). However I’m going to skip ahead and discuss some key features of the organisational society – the people and their relationships that exist and develop within the organisation.

This relates to the development of trust in organisational relationships and is based on Amy Cuddy’s suggestion that there are two key constituent factors which are competence – whether someone believes another will do what they say they will, and deliver for them; and warmth – whether we like working with them.

In The Social Organization I outline Tiziana Casciaro / Miguel Lobo’s research which suggests that we tend to work with warm lovable fools rather than competent jerks, even if that’s not what we think we’re going to do.

I link that to the main organisational groups that I address within the organisation prioritisation model, and also my orientation / motivation model, shown below. So I suggest that in simple functional groupings and horizontal teams, both of which are focused on the tasks which are performed by people, competence will be the key requirement / needed first, whereas in communities and networks, both of which are much more about the people who are doing the work, everything depends more strongly on warmth.

Because I do try to be evidence based I note that I don’t have any evidence for this conclusion. However, I still include it, as I try to be insight based as well, so I also allow room for experience based intuition:

I have therefore been thinking that I probably should run this research myself. And now it turns out that I may not need to as similar research has already been completed.

This is from an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer looking at why people downplay warmth – a really important topic, though not my focus for today:

“We carried out a series of experiments involving more than 900 participants. Some mimicked real world circumstances (for example, picking someone to work with on a task) and we found that if people’s rewards (what they expected to earn) depended solely on their own performance, they very strongly preferred to work with (or hire) someone who was described as being sociable (i.e., friendly, warm, nice) even if not that competent. But when their rewards depended at least partly on the other person’s performance, the importance of sociability went down and the emphasis on competence increased.

Simply put, when your own rewards depend on what others do, you evaluate and judge the people you work with more strongly on their competence rather than sociability and warmth.”

This isn’t quite what I was suggesting, but people’s rewards are more likely to be interdependent when people are doing work together, and less likely when they’re simply there to support each other, or to provide the potential to do work. So I think there’s indirect support for my hypothesis. Given this piece of support, I’m ready to outline an additional, linked idea.

This concerns psychological safety, which is again about how trust works in groups, but is more about whether you trust other people enough to speak out – see research by Amy Edmondson.

I think psychological safety is really important, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. If you’re working in functional groups then maybe it’s enough. But if you’re in a horizontal team you need more – a closer psychological linkage with your team members*. Just feeling safe isn’t going to be enough for you to be able to align. Also, if you’re in a community, you need much much more than this – you need a psychological desire to be with the other community members. Networks are different again – there’s no real opportunity to align, and much less opportunity to be together, so you’ve got to be curious about the other people you’re networked with – who they are and what makes them tick. This leads to the following four psychological requirements:

Remember, you read it here first!

And let me know if you’ve seen, or do see any research which proves or disproves the hypothesis. And I’ll let you know if I get around to researching it myself.

* I know Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety refers to teams, but I think these can tend to be defined a bit loosely, eg one of her examples is nurse who might suspect that a patient is being given a dangerously high dosage of medication, but who might not call the doctor to check, because the last time she spoke up, the doctor questioned her competence. That’s just a group of people working together, not a true team. I still believe (intuitively if not yet evidence based) that true teams need more.

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