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Summary

I Everybody wants to be part of a winning team. Teams rarely go
I on winning for ever. This is usually because they come to believe
I that they have a “one size fits all” formula that works in every
I situation. In an increasingly volatile business situation this is a
I major danger that all managers and team leaders need to plan to
I avoid.

Competition and conflict within and beyond
teams

Most sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists would argue that the
desire to compete and, beyond that, to demonstrate and direct aggression
has become so much part of human nature that it is an inescapable part of
the life of human groups. As I write this I am looking forward to watching
the London Marathon. The world’s greatest track long-distance runner
Gebrelselassie is running in his first marathon. He has made his intentions
publicly clear. Nothing less than a world record at the first attempt will sat-
isfy him. He intends not only to run against the field on the day, but also
to pit himself against every great runner who has completed the course in
the past. He has no interest in how the others may run. He expects to run
faster and better. In psychological and business terms we call his attitude
one of “working conflict” (no matter how good you are, I/we will do better).
Of course it turned out that Khannouchi could and did run better, but the
joy of watching three great runners in a perfect display of the best of work-
ing conflict was a joy almost as great as that of seeing Paula Radcliffe,
alone at the front of the field for the whole of the women’s race. That too
was working competition. She ran her own race regardless of what others
chose to do and led every yard of the way, running faster and faster in the
later stages. Not a team performance, simply a great one.

There is a famous and rather trivial psychological experiment that has
been repeated for few better reasons than it is fun to contemplate what
happens. When behaviourism went out of fashion and cognitive psychology
came in, the cognitive psychologists, in an attempt to show their superior-
ity began to call their colleagues who were somewhat less dedicated fol-
lowers of fashion, “rat psychologists”. The intended insult rankled. A
couple of psychologists identified a simple experiment aimed at showing
that in certain well-defined ways rats could be smarter than people. Rats
are indeed very smart animals. They learn quickly and they learn carefully.
For example, if a rat finds a new food substance that it has not tried previ-
ously it eats a tiny amount. It then waits for several hours eating nothing
else, to see if the new food makes it ill. Only when it is convinced that the
food is safe does it return and eat its fill. These are intelligent tactics. The
reason why rats are used so extensively in laboratories is based on their

74 Key management questions