Commentary

The romance of teams: Is the honeymoon over?

James R. Meindl†Center for International Leadership, School of Management,State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

†It was with great sadness and shock that the JOOP team learned of the sudden death of Jim Meindlshortly after he wrote this commentary. His passing is a major loss to our field and we offer ourcondolences to his relatives, friends and colleagues. We believe that his insights expressed in this andother publications will continue to influence research and teaching for many years to come.

It was back in 1985 that I and colleagues first coined the term ‘romance of leadership’to describe a collective commitment to the concept of leadership for understandingorganizations and their performance (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985). We arguedthat this commitment is manifested as a causal attribution, entailing a strong inclinationto reference leaders and leadership when accounting for the fates and fortunes ofgroups and organizations. So it is with considerable interest that I now read about the‘romance of teams’.

These have been the glory days for the ideology of teams. Teamwork is often thecentrepiece of progressive organizational configurations and emblematic of enlight-ened management systems. Teams and teamwork do not look so glorious when held tothe scrutiny of science. Hard-nosed, empirical research has not provided very muchevidence regarding the superior effectiveness of teams, but this seems not to havedeterred practical-minded people from embracing, often quite fervently, teamwork asthe chosen way to get things done. This enthusiasm for teams seems out of proportionto the hard evidence. Allen and Hecht (2004) have done a marvellous job of fathomingthe gap between what is known and what is believed.

In all fairness, however, and as the authors themselves acknowledge, there are anumber of things that get in the way of providing a reasonable test of whether thepractical interest in teamwork is justified on the basis of scientific research. Amongother things, issues of benchmarks and comparisons do loom rather large, as do severalother issues, including the definition of teamwork itself. What constitutes a team, and

Correspondence should be addressed to Prof Brian Becker, Department of Organization and Human Resources, 280AJacobs Management Center, School of Management, SUNY-Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA (e-mail:bbecker@buffalo.edu).

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2004), 77, 463–466© 2004 The British Psychological Society

www.bps.org.uk

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should we distinguish it from a group? Cannot an organization be considered, at somelevel, a ‘mega’ team of sorts, with people working more/less interdependently? Is therereally any question that organizations built upon the cooperative, collaborative effortsof many individuals working together will produce things that could simply not beproduced by less coordinated, independent agents? At what point does work cease tobe individual work, and when does it become group or team work? Work is notinherently atomistic or interdependent; we choose to make it more of one and/or lessof the other. Cast in this way, we probably too often choose to make work overlyinterdependent (team-working) when less interdependence would do just fine, andperhaps be even better.

Why should teams be glorified beyond reality? The authors advance some interestingspeculations about why this is the case, looking for answers in the psychology ofindividual team members. Whereas the scientific literature on teams is focused ondetermining their performance benefits, Allen and Hecht speculate that what sustainsthe excessive attraction of teamwork are not real performance benefits, but ratherpsychological ones. I find these arguments thought-provoking. I organize a few ofthese thoughts around a comparison of their description of the romance of teamsagainst the romance of leadership. As it stands, there are a couple of key differences,and I believe drawing them out is instructive and potentially useful for those whomight be interested in further pursuing the ideas raised by the authors.

The romance of leadership notion asserts that people have a biased preference toexplain the performance of groups and organizations – both good and bad – in terms ofleadership. The romance of teams notion seems to focus on the belief that teams aregood, i.e., denoting very positive attitudes about the effects of teams. The romance ofleadership is about assumptions regarding the importance of leadership to createeither very positive or very negative performance outcomes, implicitly making a com-parison between good and bad leadership; whereas the romance of teams seems moreabout the goodness of teams, and their positive effects, with the implicit comparisonbeing teamwork versus individual work. With such a conception, teams are assumed togenerate good performance and therefore serve as a sufficient explanation when itoccurs. However, and by the same logic, teams cannot be used to explain poor ornegative outcomes. In other words, there is a team serving bias: Teams get credit forpositive outcomes, but are not blamed for negative ones. With the romance of leader-ship notion, leadership is credited with good outcomes but also discredited with badones as well. Thus, the romance of teams denotes beliefs about the correlationbetween performance, and the presence or absence (quantity) of group-based work.The quality of teamwork is less an issue, since it is assumed that group-based work isbetter than individualized work, whereas the romance of leadership is more focusedon quality – good or bad – and not the amount (quantity) of leadership.

The romance of leadership involves a psychology that highlights the benefits ofattributing outcomes to leadership. The faithful belief in leadership is itself beneficialin providing a sense of comfort and security, in reducing feelings of uncertainty, and inproviding a sense of human agency and control. By contrast, it appears that with theromance of teams notion, it is not the beliefs that bring psychological benefits (socio-emotional and competency-related), but rather the reverse: the benefits produce thebeliefs. The socio-emotional and competency-related benefits identified by the authorsderive from the actual experiences of working in a team. Thus, there is a chain ofcausality: teamwork experiences generate benefits, and those benefits in turn producethe beliefs.

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This presumed chain of causality constitutes something of a theory that one couldput to the test. For example, if the speculations of Allen and Hecht are correct, itwould seem that people with the most teamwork experiences should have thestrongest, more romanticized beliefs about teams (because those experiences arenecessary for the psychological benefits to occur). Stated at a more macro, collectivelevel, we should only see widespread romance among populations where teamworkexperiences are prevalent. Of course, readers might disagree with such predictions,but they do seem to follow from the causal chain implied by the romance of teamsnotion, at least as I trace the arguments outlined in the paper.

The veracity of this prediction would seem to rest critically on the idea that benefitsaccrue to individual group members merely through their participation in groupworkwith one another. On the face of it, there would seem to be quite a few moderators ofthe actual benefits received from group-work activities. One could think of a whole raftof experiences and conditions that would make it more or less difficult for suchbenefits to be psychologically realized by team members. But if what the authors say istrue (widespread romance exists), those conditions must be relatively rare in nature.This line of thought also suggests some interesting interventions if one were on acrusade to rein in the overblown, romanticized attitudes about goodness of teams.Perhaps group-work interventions deliberately designed to make it difficult forpeople to experience socio-emotional and competency-based benefits in the absenceof high team performance would provide an antidote to the romance developing.

The authors present what is essentially a need based explanation: the benefits thatsupport the emergence of romanticized beliefs are fulfilling widespread socio-emotional and competency needs. But how widespread and strong are those needs? If,for some reason, people are, or become, less needy, there ought to be less benefit fromworking in teams and therefore less romanticized views. Certain contexts/conditionsmight diminish or exacerbate those needs, and there may also be certain individualswho are generally more or less needy than others. Perhaps individual measures ofromanticized beliefs, state and trait measures of needs, could be examined in conjunc-tion with measures of socio-emotional and competency-based outcomes, to explorethe simple model depicted in Fig. 1.

The accumulated scientific evidence, as summarized by the authors, is that teams donot conclusively improve performance beyond the performance of individuals. It maybe that eventually, with increasing experience of working in teams, people will have

Figure 1. Model of romanticized beliefs.

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more data to recognize the same pattern. Whatever psychological benefits are accruingto support the romance will be running up against increasing evidence that perform-ance benefits are not being obtained. The illusion would gradually be weakenedbecause accumulated evidence of ineffectiveness would be building. At some point,this evidence will overwhelm the illusion that is being maintained by the psychologicalbenefits. This suggests a curvilinear, inverted, U-shaped relationship between amountof team working experience and strength of the romanticized view: It will get strongerfor a while, but as new evidence accumulates, the illusion becomes more difficult tomaintain, and the romance will decline. This curve may describe individual as well asmore collective experiences. In this last regard, the very existence of the publicationby Allen and Hecht may provide us with a signal that our romance with teams mayhave already reached its passionate crescendo and that the honeymoon will soon beover.

References

Allen, N. J., & Hecht, T. D. (2004). The ‘romance of teams’: Toward an understanding ofits psychological underpinnings and implications. Journal of Occupational andOrganizational Psychology, 77, 439–461.

Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. AdministrativeScience Quarterly, 30, 78–102.

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