1 of 15

Is There An “I” In Team? �Gender and Ethnic Differences in Teamwork in the U.S.

Lucy Bencharit, PhD

Cade Creason, B.S. and B.A.

IACCP 2024

Today I want to talk to you about an idea that my team and I have been investigating for some time now, and the talk is entitiled is there and I in team: Gender and Ethnic differences in teamwork in the US.

In the US there is a classic saying: There is no I in team. How many have heard this saying? For those who have not, This saying is meant to remind people working on teams that the effort is not about them as individuals, but about their shared goals with others. This saying may be popular because teamwork stands in opposition to the larger cultural contexts in the US which pushes people towards individualism, or having an independent model of self.

We sought out to investigate whether there is any merit to the saying, that there is no I in team. AND whether reminding students that this is the case,and that teamwork is about the needs of others more than the needs of themselves, might help people do teamwork better.

2 of 15

Thank you…

Collaborators & Students:

Lucy Bencharit
Cade Creason
Hazel Markus
Dia Dariwhal
Julia Lee Cunningham
Alyssa Fu
Isabella Gasparayan
Sofia Paletto

Labs:

Culture, Diversity & Identity Lab
Stanford SPARQ

Funding Sources:

3 of 15

Roadmap for today

How does culture influence teamwork?

Gender and Ethnic Differences in the U.S.

Current Directions: Cross-Cultural Differences Between East and West

4 of 15

GROUPS:

Individual goals and accountability

TEAMS:

Mutual goals and accountability

Shared

Goal

What is teamwork?

Wageman, 1995

To understand what teamwork is, let’s briefly look at how teams are different from groups. While groups are collections of individuals that might work together on something, they often have individual goals. Teams are organized and have a shared goal. Typically their outcomes are tied together.

So we in this room might be a group because we are collectively interested in organizational outcomes across cultures however we are not a team because we have not all agreed on a shared goal. However, if we decided that we are going to be the best symposium in IACCP then that would be our shared goal, and we would come together to work on that as a team.

_______________

...but lines are very fuzzy. Some traditional teams are in organizations, in specialty professions (police, fire), and in sports. There are many other types of teams out there. Teams work better than groups because they have shared goals, so if you can turn a group into a team, that is beneficial.

�So when you design a team (which we’ll talk about more on Wednesday) you want to make sure they have mutual accountability. For example in this class your grade will be 40% of your team’s work. I do this even though it makes some students tremendously stressed, because it helps with this accountability factor.

5 of 15

Importance of Teamwork

Zippia Research, 2022

Now that we know what teamwork is I want to show why teamwork is important. Here are some cross national statistics around how employees spend their time. Across sectors, we see that employees are reporting they spend 45% of their time working on teams.

We don’t yet have statistics around how many of those teams are multicultural or international, but I would venture to guess that many are. It is especially important to study teamwork at this point in time.

More than 50% of workers say their jobs are reliant on collaboration
About 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as being very important
56% of employers use online collaboration tools and social media to communicate with employees
86% of employees in leadership positions blame lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failures
Companies that promote collaboration and communication at work have been linked to reducing employee turnover rates by 50%
Employees are, on average, 17% more satisfied with their job when they engage in collaboration at work

6 of 15

Difficulties of Teamwork

____

Funny enough I am worried about team work since I fear my values might not align with others values and it could potentially lead to a lack of effort from others. However, I am open minded and excited to take on the challenge!

Working with people on teams

Teamwork is harder in specific cultural contexts

Teamwork is important but it is hard. This is SLO where I’m coming from. And next I’ll show you some student testimonials from my Teamwork class

When students are asked: What concerns you most about this course? Here are some sample responses.

I won’t be showing you these data today, though we are in the process of coding them for themes, but this is more to illustrate that even in a teamwork class, people anticipate that it will be hard. Some of that is from prior negative teamwork experiences, some from negative attitudes around working with others, and most from this idea that independent work is better, easier, more enjoyable than team work. This may sound familiar to some of you. My proposition is that teamwork may be hard. But it is harder for some people than it is for others. And in our hypotheses, we predict that we can use culture to explain why that is and for whom it may be hardest!

7 of 15

How does culture influence teamwork?

Independent Cultural Contexts

Interdependent Cultural Contexts

Markus & Kitayama, 1991

We predict that in independent cultural contexts like the US, where the focus is on the self, teamwork will be more difficult. This is in contrast to interdependent cultural contexts, ones in which the vast majority of people are interdependent and have been focusing on others their entire lives. In these cultures the institutions and interactions are structured around the needs and goals of others, not just the self. Some we hypothesize that the saying “There is no I in teamwork” may actually function in this way in interdependent cultural contexts, not because they have a saying urging people to think about others but because many of their experiences are structured around thinking of and attending to others.

Our higher education institutions reflect that. We may assign teamwork but it is very rare that the work is for a large proportion of students’ grades. For example in my teamwork class when I set the team project as 60% of students grades, they were outraged! Even if we do assign team work and give them high stakes using grades or other incentives, it is very rare that we teach them HOW to work together. We assume that they are people in this world and should know how to work with other people; which is an assumption that is more often false than it is true, at least from my experience!

8 of 15

Prior research shows culture matters for teamwork

Dittman, Stephens & Townsend, 2020

Divide and Conquer

Working Together

Middle Class Students

Working Class Students

There is some work that already supports these predictions from Andrea Dittman and Nicole Stephens and Sarah Townsend. Here they had middle class and working class students work on a teamwork task, and the middle class students, who are from independent cultural backgrounds do something that they call divide and conquer. We’ve all seen this in our classes, this is when students spit up the work on day 1 and many enter everything into a google shared doc, then get together in their last week of class to maybe meet for 10 minutes of zoom before submitting it. In contrast they see working class students actually wokrring together, and what this means is that they engage in more turn taking. And they indeed find that working class students are more successful at teamwork and enjoy teamwork better than their middle class counterparts. This is some evidence that culture as it is instantiated in social class identities, might shape the way we interact with others.

9 of 15

Participants

611 U.S. Undergraduate Business Students
40% Non-white
37% Female
Age: M = 20

Pre-class

Survey

Teamwork Instructions & Task

Post-class Survey

10 of 15

Methods

Debate with others
Convince others that you are right
Try to influence others
Assert your own ideas/opinions

10

Influencing Strategies

Adjusting Strategies

More common for independent groups

Adjust to others
Take others’ suggestions
Affirm others’ views
Listen to others’ ideas/opinions

More common for interdependent groups

Pre-class

Survey

11 of 15

Results

* p < .05

** p < .01

*** p < .001

Gender * Racial Group Interaction: F (1, 595) = 4.68, p = .03, partial η²= .01

Gender & Racial Differences in Influencing Strategies

Pre-class

Survey

We found some support for this hypothesis when we looked at what students reported

To test this hypothesis, we conducted a 2 [Race: White, POC] X 2 [Gender: Male, Female] analysis of variance (ANOVA) test on the aggregate value of self-reported influencing strategies. We found a main effect of race, such that white people (M = 3.16, SE = .04) reported using more influencing strategies compared to people of color (M = 3.04, SE = .05), F (1, 595) = 4.68, p = .03, partial η²= .01. We found a main effect of gender; males (M = 3.19, SE = .04) reported using more influencing strategies than females (M = 2.97, SE = .05 ), F (1, 595) = 13.66, p < .001, partial η² = .02. While we did not find a significant race and gender interaction , p = .16, we conducted planned pairwise comparisons to examine whether there were any significant differences between the white men, white women, POC men, and POC women in their use of influencing strategies during teamwork. We found a significant difference between POC women and white men, with white men using influence strategies more than POC women, p = .001, 95% CI = [3.05, 3.17], (POC women: M = 2.84, SE =.08; white men: M = 3.21, SE = .05 ). There is a significant difference in group mean scores, p = .024, between POC women and white women in self reported scores (1-5) in which all participants reported how much they tried to influence their group, white women influencing more than POC women (POC women: M = 2.841, SE = .08; white women: M = 3.065, SE = .07). There is a significant difference in group mean scores, p < .001, between POC women and POC men in self reported scores (1-5) in which all participants reported how much they tried to influence their group, POC men influencing more than POC women (POC women: M = 2.84, SE = .08; POC men: M = 3.161; SE = .061).

�

12 of 15

Results

𝛘² (3) = 15.79, p < .001

Interdependent People Choose Adjusting More

Pre-class

Survey

13 of 15

Current directions: �Cross-Cultural Comparisons

14 of 15

Implications & Applications

Teach HOW and WHEN to practice interdependence

Communicate with your team if you have an issue. You'll be amazed the personal and interpersonal growth that happens when you choose to engage in constructive conflict respectfully. Allow yourself the grace to mess up, and apologize when you make a mistake in the pursuit of being a better teammate.

Going back to this question we started with is there an I in teamwork? Our research shows that for some, specifically those from independent cultural contexts, yes there is an I in teamwork. The way they approach teamwork is to think about their own goals and to influence others with their ideas. In our sample, we saw this was most prevalent with White men and least prevalent with women of color.

I also want to return to the concept of teamwork more broadly as something that we take for granted in our classes and in the professional setting more generally. Our research suggests that people do teamwork different and that will inevitably lead to conflict and miscommunications. What we need to do is to teach people how to engage in teamwork in different ways so that people can be more effective at it. Given that I am at a predominantly white college, I do this by teaching about interdependence, and specifically that teamwork as a context in which honing your interdependence might help you be more successful. Of course not all contexts or task require interdependence, like if you are taking a GRE or any other test of your individual skills.

However, teamwork is the opposite of that, where those who do best are focused on shared goals. This has helped my students tremendously. Here one of my students when asked what she would tell others about how to be successful in this class she says…

This may seem obvious, principles like communicating and admitting to your mistakes and engaging with others, but in our independent cultural contexts it is actually something that they need to learn to do (maybe not here or in other more interdependent contexts).

15 of 15

Questions?

ybenchar@calpoly.edu

ccreason@calpoly.edu