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Design Thinking Research pp 237–263Cite as

Did It Have to End This Way? Understanding the Consistency of Team Fracture

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Part of the book series: Understanding Innovation ((UNDINNO))

Abstract

Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team’s collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To test the robustness of our effects, we analyzed the impact of varying this percentage in our analysis code and conducting otherwise identical analysis, e.g., one person voting to fracture at 25%, or a supermajority at 75% of the group voting to fracture. The main results remained consistent. So, we report the results for ≥50% in this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to Alex Huy Nguyen, Pheobe Kimm, Maika Isogawa and Kevin Lin for their contributions to this work, and to the thousands of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers for their participation in our pilots and study. This project was supported by the Stanford Data Science Initiative, RISE Thailand Consortium, the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program, the Office of Naval Research (N00014-16-1-2894), and a National Science Foundation award IIS-1351131.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mark E. Whiting, Allie Blaising, Chloe Barreau, Laura Fiuza, Nik Marda, Melissa Valentine & Michael S. Bernstein

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  1. Mark E. Whiting
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  2. Allie Blaising
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Correspondence to Mark E. Whiting .

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  1. Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Christoph Meinel

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Larry Leifer

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Whiting, M.E. et al. (2021). Did It Have to End This Way? Understanding the Consistency of Team Fracture. In: Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research . Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62037-0_11

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