It’s an all too common refrain. When a CEO is asked for insight into his managerial success he replies that he owes it all to his terrific employees. While once upon a time that may have been a convenient escape response for a time-pressed exec, these days managers are putting some weight behind those words by investing a great deal of their time in people management. MBA grads confess that they wish they had taken more classes in organizational management as they are faced with the reality of how and why people behave the way they do in organizations and what really drives the employee thought process when they are put to a particular task.

 

The military is equally concerned with the efficiency of different organizational team structures. Therefore, a grant from the Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division of the Office of Naval Research prompted laboratory research into team structures that resulted, in part, in the paper “Asymmetric Adaptability: Dynamic Team Structures As One-Way Streets.” Co-authored by Henry Moon of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School; John R. Hollenbeck, Stephen E. Humphrey, Daniel R. Ilgen and Bradley West of Michigan State University; Aleksander P.J. Ellis of the University of Arizona; and Christopher O.L.H Porter of Texas A&M University, the study tested whether teams working on a command and control simulation adapted to structural change in the manner implied by contingency theories. Classic structural contingency theory holds that the structure of an organization must match the dictates of the environment. In dynamic environments the flexibility of divisional structures is beneficial while in placid environments the efficiency of functional structures is beneficial.

 

The findings, published last year in the Academy of Management Journal, introduced the concept of asymmetric adaptability to the field of organizational behavior. In general, the paper argues that certain types of adaptation are going to be more natural than others, and that the prior experience of working under an earlier system influences how people react to the adapted system. That is, the researchers questioned whether it is just as easy to go from A to B as it is to go from B to A. “For 30 years we’ve been teaching managers contingency decision-making,” explains Moon, an assistant professor of organization and management at Goizueta. “You go to the guide and you say this decision needs to be autonomous or this decision needs to be participative. Contingency theory means that you make a decision based on whatever the needs are. Let’s say for the first six months this theory says the style needs to be wholly participative and then some contingencies change in the environment and the theory says now you have to change your decision-making to be one that is totally autonomous. You make the decision without input. It makes perfect sense when you read the textbook, but not always in real life in terms of how people react and think about these things.”

 

Moon and his co-authors set out to study the idea of structural contingency by observing individuals and teams at work. This was somewhat of a departure from existing theories that have often explored contingency theory from a more macro, organizational perspective. Research participants were 252 upper-level students, each of whom was in 1 of 63 four-person teams. The task was the modified version of a simulation developed for the Department of Defense. Each individual participant controlled four vehicles that could be launched and then moved to any area on the computer screen, including areas monitored by other team members. The vehicles were AWACS planes, tanks, helicopters and jets. The managers had to use 4 vehicles to identify and engage various tracks on a single networked simulation grid.  In order to measure the way the teams went about their tasks, each team experienced two types of task environments and different structures that necessitated more or less group participation. These were distinguished as either functional structure or divisional structure.

 

Functional to divisional versus divisional to functional structure was fundamental to the paper’s findings. “In our conceptualization of functional, interdependence is very high,” explains Moon. “In functional structure, if I have only tanks in some ways that’s all I do. But I need your help when I need jets because you have all the jets. I’m really dependent on you and I have low independence. The opposite, the divisional structure, would be one where I have the four vehicles I manage—the tank, the jet, the AWACS and the helicopter—and in that sense I don’t need anyone else because no matter what happens in this game I have something that can handle it. In the business sense, that might be someone who is the generalist, the entrepreneur when they start out they have to do their own bookkeeping, sales, and finding customers.”

 

Ultimately, teams shifting from a functional to a divisional structure showed better performance than teams making a divisional-to-functional shift. “I sat down and I watched some students go through this transition and I immediately sensed something that was not at the organizational level but was individual psychology,” says Moon. “I noticed that if you start off having autonomy that you hate to give it up. If you don’t start off with autonomy and you are all interdependent, then when you’re given autonomy you’ll actually appreciate that and you’ll be able to use it better. Teams that started out in a functional structure had to talk to each other as they managed these four geographic areas on a computer screen. They developed these norms of communication, these patterns and habits. When we gave them autonomy, they still talked a lot because they were used to it. But when you start out divisionally you are your own boss. You take these people who are used to not talking and you put them in a structure where they are totally dependent upon one another, they didn’t talk enough. They had bad norms of communication.”

 

These findings, suggests Moon, have important implications for business managers and team leaders. For one, if managers are switching from a divisional to a functional structure they need to train or encourage the communication that would be required because habits are already formed. These individuals have shown that they do not communicate as much as they need to.

 

It may be even more important, however, for managers to consider another critical finding of the “Asymmetric Adaptability” study, urges Moon. Managers need to think in terms of individual differences. “We found that those who are high in cognitive ability (intelligence) performed even worse in the divisional to functional change,” Moon explains. “That has huge implications. Organizations are seeking the best talent and trying to recruit the hottest MBAs and then giving them all this responsibility. Dynamically, the person needs to perceive that they are gaining more autonomy and more responsibility. It is a negative if they perceive it going the opposite way. It gets worse to the extent that they have high cognitive ability or intelligence. But managers will make the mistake of giving talented individuals too much too early because they read books about empowering their employees, trusting them and giving them autonomy. Based on our findings, I suspect you’re going to come into a lot of problems if the Pandora’s box is opened too early.”