How group cohesion acts to manage stress

Group cohesion is critical in stressful situations, but shouldn't be artificially engineered.

“There is no ‘I’ in team.”

It is rare that a management strategy morphs into self-parody, but this oft-used cliché of a manager attempting to jolly team members into a cohesive, high-performing workforce certainly qualifies.

It’s harder to explain exactly why the sentiment so often falls flat, but a clue may be found in the writings of military veterans such as RAAF Squadron Leader Gary Williams and Captain Arthur Smith, who have observed first-hand the life and death impacts of either successfully building (or failing to establish) cohesive teams.

Drawing on historical analyses including comparisons of deployment patterns in the Korean and Vietnam wars, they offer compelling evidence that cohesive teams produce:

• higher performance

• higher commitment

• greater individual wellbeing

• greater team resilience under stress

• less inter-team conflict

• fewer counter-productive acts

In cohesive teams, the web of deep and highly meaningful interpersonal ties constructed through trust, dependence, and mutual reliance prevents disintegration of the individual psyche under extreme pressure.

Smith describes team cohesion as essential “psychological armour” that mitigates the effects of stress, sustains commitment, enhances perceived safety and competence of the team, and helps individuals endure grief, loss, or trauma.

While there are easy and obvious parallels to be drawn between military group cohesion and other civilian environments such as emergency departments, paramedics, and fire response teams, the lessons of cohesion apply more broadly as well. Anytime there are significant levels of hardship, risk, and suffering, cohesion is essential to success.

(These terms should be broadly understood — for example, crunch time in finishing a video game development cycle would meet the criteria.)

Without cohesion, teams fragment and individuals focus on self-preservation. This creates lower team discipline, higher error rates, a refusal to engage, and in the more extreme cases, quiet quitting (avoiding productive work), sabotaging behaviours, and mass resignations.

Cohesive teams are more likely to form where:

• There is a strong sense of belonging and commitment to common goals, sometimes expressed as “shared fate” and “skin in the game” among staff, supervisors, and managers

• There is a strong sense of survivability in a hostile environment; that is, everything is being done to keep people safe despite the challenges

• People are confident in their team’s training and in the ability of team members to step in or step up as required

These factors can be summarised as affiliation, safety, purpose, and trust.

Managers can attempt to engineer affiliation in a team through the use of shared rituals such as standardized daily briefings, after-action reviews, consistent safety protocols, and strong adherence to rules such as punctuality, documentation, language, and appearance.

However, strategies promoting cohesion work to provide structure, meaning, and coherence in an otherwise chaotic, life-threatening environment. The group becomes a haven that enhances the individual sense of collective power, safety, and survivability in situations of stress and grief.

This can feel wrong and inappropriate when applied in the context of staff working at the local appliance sales store. Engineered cohesion rarely works and it is generally better to focus on trust over cohesion in these situations.

However the higher the stakes, the greater the need for cohesive teams. And managers should beware: If you create an environment perceived as hazardous to staff (by being a bully or even just by continually setting unrealistic expectations), the naturally occurring dynamics of cohesion can lead to your employees seeing you as a force to be resisted, rather than as part of the solution.