Leadership in Action: Seven Common Beliefs About Teams: Are They True?

As they work together, team members develop “one mind” about what is going well or poorly on the team.

False.

In our experience members rarely have “one mind” about what is going well or poorly on the team. Commonly used terms such as groupthink and mob behavior suggest that people who join teams lose their ability to think independently, as if their brains meld into one collective mind. This is not necessarily true. We have found that a wide range of scores within teams is common and that these differences are stable; they hold up over a two- to four-week period when the survey is administered twice. On your own team you are likely to have at least one person who thinks things are going fine and at least one who is substantially more critical. ...