Research Roundup: The 'Dark Side' of Teams; the Risks of Social Comparisons; and the Transfer of Entrepreneurial Skills

Does working in teams make people less receptive to outside input? How can social comparisons undermine trust in working relationships? How do the training and technical knowledge entrepreneurs take from previous employers impact the success of their new ventures? Wharton professor Jennifer Mueller and lecturer Julia Minson, and professors Maurice Schweitzer and Evan Rawley, respectively, examine these issues, and what they mean for business, in recent research papers.

Confidence's Cost to Collaboration

The corporate formula for innovation often focuses on creating a team of experts to cook up the next big thing. Groups of managers -- typically composed of individuals from a variety of fields, including engineering, marketing and operations -- band together to develop new products or services that can create top-line growth. In a recent paper, Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller and Wharton lecturer Julia Minson looked at the dark side of teamwork -- the tendency of those groups to become insular and less efficient as they grow in complexity.

In "The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision-making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information," Minson and Mueller found that people working in pairs were more likely to dismiss outside input than individuals working alone. Mueller says this reluctance to incorporate information from outside the team can be a major problem. "Any time a team creates something novel, this decision to integrate information from the outside is key to their success," she says. "You don't succeed unless there is a manager on the outside who thinks what you are doing should be funded. If you are resistant to their input, that is a huge disadvantage." As outlined in the paper, there are reasons to expect that the act of teaming up would make people either more or less receptive to factoring outside information into their decisions. "Individuals [might] underweight peer input because they are overly attached to their own views," Mueller and Minson wrote.

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