The Economist's Bartleby: Are you committed to your company or your team?

Employees bond fastest with the people sitting closest to them, not the logo on the building. New research shows staff typically identify more strongly with their immediate team or department than with their employer as a whole. That loyalty has upsides, but it also breeds silos, turf wars over budgets and weaker understanding of overall strategy. A classic experiment with football fans offers a clue for bosses: when people are prompted to think of themselves as part of something bigger, their sense of "us" expands too..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.Humans are conditioned to form allegiances extremely quickly, a type of behaviour sometimes called the “minimal group effect”. In a famous series of experiments, a social psychologist called Henri Tajfel found that you can divide strangers into groups on totally arbitrary grounds—how good they are at estimating the number of dots on a chart, say, or how much they like a certain type of abstract art, or even just on the basis of a coin toss—and they will immediately start to favour members of their own group when then asked to distribute rewards.If people are prepared to start dividing the world into “us” and “them” based on whether someone likes Mondrian, it’s no surprise that they form strong identities and loyalties based on where they go to work every day. One of the small diversions of office life is watching to see how quickly joiners start using the word “we” to refer to their new employer: it’s usually instantaneous and occasionally takes place during the interview.But if you work for a large enough company, you do not belong only to the organisation. You have “nested identities”: you are also a member of a department, and of a team within that department, and perhaps of smaller groups as well. These other in-groups can really matter. A research meta-analysis by Michael Riketta of the University of Tübingen and Rolf van Dick of Goethe University finds that on average employees identify more strongly with their work group than with their organisation.That ought not to be a huge surprise. Proximity, familiarity and shared routines bind people from a specific team together. Identities at work also depend largely on which department you are in. If you are at a staff event for Widget & Sons and a colleague asks what you do, you don’t say “I work for Widget & Sons” but tell them which group you work in.Identifying with a sub-group is not necessarily bad. It makes perfect sense for organisations to divide labour up among departments. A bit of friendly competition between teams can be useful. But a strong sense of group identity can also impede co-operation across the wider organisation. It becomes natural to blame the general uselessness of other departments if things go wrong. Budget allocations are framed as victories and losses. Information may well be hoarded in silos rather than shared. A paper by Jeanine Pieternel Porck of Oklahoma State University and her co-authors finds, for example, that a strong sense of group identification is associated with reduced understanding of an organisation’s strategy.For executives, therefore, the challenge is to reconcile strong bonds within teams with a sense of commitment to the organisation as a whole. An example from outside the office helps explain how to go about this. A long long time ago, when Manchester United was a dominant football club, a group of researchers wondered whether being a fan of the team would affect someone’s willingness to help a supporter of a rival outfit. Mark Levine of Lancaster University and his co-authors ran an experiment in which self-identified fans were first reminded of their allegiance to Man Utd and later encountered a jogger who deliberately slipped and fell in front of them. The participants were more likely to offer help if the stranger was wearing a Man Utd football shirt than if they were sporting a Liverpool one or a plain top.The thought-provoking part came next. The researchers ran the same experiment with another group of United supporters, but this time the participants were primed to think of themselves as fans of the beautiful game rather than of a specific club. Now, when they saw someone appear to injure themselves, they were equally likely to offer help to anyone wearing a football shirt, their own or Liverpool’s. It’s not a watertight experiment. Nor is it a heart-warming story: whatever happens, some poor soul in a plain top is left hurt and unaided. But it is an instructive one..Read more:. How do you know if you’re a good employee? Check with the team – Tyler Cowen.Employees will naturally form in-group relationships with their closest team-mates. Bosses often have to work harder to ensure that people also feel like members of the wider organisation. That might mean making efforts to bring people from different teams into contact with each other, through project-based work or social events or the physical layout of the office. It definitely means explaining to members of departments how their work contributes to the health of the overall organisation. People are quick to divide into “us and them”. “Us and us” takes a bit more thought..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

The Economist's Bartleby: Are you committed to your company or your team?

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