Yesterday’s New York Times featured a fascinating article about teamwork and group performance – using the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox as case studies. The story focuses on whether or not decentralized groups perform better than strongly connected ones.
For anyone with an interest in group dynamics and teamwork (or a love of baseball) this article is a must read. Here are a couple of excerpts:
…social scientists who have studied group performance under pressure say that often it is decentralized groups (like the Yankees) that prove more resilient than strongly connected ones (like the Red Sox); they are better able to weather outside criticism and internal quarrels.
…winning is more likely to create team unity than vice versa, Torre has said repeatedly, and the evidence backs him up, said Dr. Richard Moreland, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pittsburgh. Team cohesion is a hard thing to measure in the first place, Dr. Moreland said, and dozens of studies of sports teams find that, although having players who feel team unity helps performance, “it is not a strong effect, compared to the effect of performance on cohesion.” (New York Times, Monday, March 7th, 2005)
Full text of the article:
Close Doesn’t Always Count in Winning Games
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/sports/baseball/07psych.html
On another note, yesterday’s Times also published the following article that should be of interest to the media and entertainment crowd:
Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/movies/06vann.html
