Evaluating individual performance or team performance?

Looking for ways to facilitate teamwork, the decision is often taken to evaluate the team's performance, but is this decision one that leads to increasing the organization's performance or achieving business objectives?

An answer can be found in social psychology, which defines social facilitation and social laziness. Social psychology is “in a sense of maximum generality, […] the scientific study of the real or imaginary interaction between social actors (individuals, groups) within a determined social, cultural and historical context” (A. Gavreliuc, 2002, “Travel with the “other”), a definition that undoubtedly applies to the organizational environment, in which social actors are employees and departments, and the social, cultural and historical context is the organizational context defined by culture, system of (social) relations and common history.

According to this side of psychology, social facilitation represents the increase of performance in the task in the presence of "the other" (A. Gavreliuc, 2002), and social laziness describes how performance and motivation decrease when the task is performed in groups or within a team. Research in the field has shown that there is an increase in the performance of team tasks, but only for those simple, repetitive tasks or when team members are close to each other (eg family members), and in the case of complex or ongoing tasks learning, the context of the team decreases the individual performance and implicitly the individual effort made to accomplish the task, with significant results for groups of 6-8 people and this happens regardless of the type of culture - collectivist or individualist or the nature of work - physical or intellectual.

Social laziness has been explained by various researchers through the diffusion of responsibility (Latane, 1981) or the expectation-valorization model (Karau, Williams, 1993). The expectation-valorization model explains that an individual will be able to be mobilized and motivated based on a symbolic calculation, depending on how much he perceives that he will be rewarded, a reward that is not only up to him, but up to all group members, in case of teamwork. In other words, if the employee's perception is that the other teammates are not working well or well enough for the reward to be satisfactory, the personal effort will not be increased either, because the reward will depend on the effort of the majority, in this case - low , unsatisfactory.

Taking into account these concepts, the decision to reward the performance of the whole team is a decision that must be taken only in situations where such actions are suitable: simple, repetitive tasks or in mature teams, in which members respect and value each other. Rewarding the team's effort in other situations can even generate demotivation, non-involvement, low effort at the individual level, which negatively affects organizational performance. Moreover, perhaps this is how we find the answer to questions such as: “Why doesn’t the productivity bonus (granted based on the productivity of the team, not the individual) work? or «Why doesn't the absenteeism rate decrease, even though we grant an attendance bonus? »