New research shows that when people need help getting a job done, they’ll choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one. That has big implications for every organization—and not all of them are negative.
by Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo
One of management’s greatest challenges arises from a natural tension inherent in every organization. People are brought together because they have the variety of skills that, in concert, are needed to carry out a complex activity. But this variety inevitably leads to fragmentation of the organization into silos of specialized knowledge and activity.
It’s an understatement to say that resolving this tension is crucial to success in today’s knowledge-based and collaborative business environment. How do you ensure that relevant information gets transferred between two parts of an organization that have different cultures? How do you encourage people from units competing for scarce corporate resources to work together? How do you see to it that the value of a cross-functional team is more, not less, than the sum of its parts?
The answers to such questions lie not in an examination of organization charts but largely in an understanding of informal social networks and how they emerge. Certainly, organizations are designed to ensure that people interact in ways necessary to get their jobs done. But all kinds of work-related encounters and relationships exist that only partly reflect these purposefully designed structures. Even in the context of formal structures like cross-functional teams, informal relationships play a major role.
In this article, we offer somewhat surprising insights into how informal networks take shape in companies—that is, how people choose those they work with. We then discuss some of the benefits and drawbacks of this phenomenon and offer ways for managers to mitigate its negative effects and leverage the positive ones.
How We Choose Work Partners
When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers. But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job (Does Joe know what he’s doing?). The other is likability (Is Joe enjoyable to work with?). Obviously, both things matter. Less obvious is how much they matter—and exactly how they matter.
To gain some insight into these questions, we studied four organizations selected to reflect a wide range of attributes—for-profit and nonprofit, large and small, North American and European. We asked people to indicate how often they had work-related interactions with every other person in the organization. We then asked them to rate all the other people in the company in terms of how much they personally liked each one and how well each did his or her job. (For a more-detailed description of the studies, see the “Who Is Good? Who Is Liked?”)
These two criteria—competence and likability—combine to produce four archetypes: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who’s both smart and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who…well, that’s self-explanatory. These archetypes are caricatures, of course: Organizations usually—well, much of the time—weed out both the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless. Still, people in an organization can be roughly classified using a simple matrix. (Indeed, with relative ease you can probably populate the four boxes depicted in the “Whom Would You Choose?” with the names of people in your own company.)
Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.
