America’s top workplaces In 2007, 2008, 2012, 2013, and 2014, Google was ranked number one by Fortune.
one of the effort’s researchers In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Julia Rozovsky wrote: “I worked on several other efforts prior to joining the Project Aristotle team. Here’s a quick bio that I use internally: ‘Julia Rozovsky joined Google’s People Analytics team in August 2012. During her time at Google, Julia has advised teams on workforce planning and design strategies, analyzed the impact of workplace flexibility programs, and conducted research on empowering leaders. She is currently the [project manager] of Project Aristotle, which aims to improve team effectiveness at Google. Prior to Google, Julia collaborated with Harvard Business School academics on competitive strategy and organizational behavior research focusing specifically on game theory, ethics and financial controls, and organizational structure. Earlier in her career, Julia was a strategy consultant with a boutique marketing analytics firm. Julia holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management, and a BA in mathematics and economics from Tufts University.’?”
made a team effective In comments sent in response to fact-checking questions, a Google spokeswoman wrote: “The first thing we had to start with was the definition of a team, and we arrived at groups of people collaborating closely on projects and working toward a common goal. Then, since we knew a hierarchical team definition would be too limiting in our environment where people collaborate across reporting lines, we had to figure out how to systematically identify intact teams and their accurate membership so we could study them. In the end, we had to do it manually, by asking senior leaders to identify teams in their orgs and ask the teams’ leads to confirm the members.”
“appropriate behavior” David Lyle Light Shields et al., “Leadership, Cohesion, and Team Norms Regarding Cheating and Aggression,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 324–36.
deference to the team For more on norms, please see Muzafer Sherif, The Psychology of Social Norms (London: Octagon Books, 1965); Jay Jackson, “Structural Characteristics of Norms,” Current Studies in Social Psychology 301 (1965): 309; P. Wesley Schultz et al., “The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 429–34; Robert B. Cialdini, “Descriptive Social Norms as Underappreciated Sources of Social Control,” Psychometrika 72, no. 2 (2007): 263–68; Keithia L. Wilson et al., “Social Rules for Managing Attempted Interpersonal Domination in the Workplace: Influence of Status and Gender,” Sex Roles 44, nos. 3–4 (2001): 129–54; Daniel C. Feldman, “The Development and Enforcement of Group Norms,” Academy of Management Review 9, no. 1 (1984): 47–53; Deborah J. Terry, Michael A. Hogg, and Katherine M. White, “The Theory of Planned Behaviour: Self-Identity, Social Identity and Group Norms,” The British Journal of Social Psychology 38 (1999): 225; Jolanda Jetten, Russell Spears, and Antony S. R. Manstead, “Strength of Identification and Intergroup Differentiation: The Influence of Group Norms,” European Journal of Social Psychology 27, no. 5 (1997): 603–9; Mark G. Ehrhart and Stefanie E. Naumann, “Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Work Groups: A Group Norms Approach,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89, no. 6 (2004): 960; Daniel C. Feldman, “The Development and Enforcement of Group Norms,” Academy of Management Review 9, no. 1 (1984): 47–53; Jennifer A. Chatman and Francis J. Flynn, “The Influence of Demographic Heterogeneity on the Emergence and Consequences of Cooperative Norms in Work Teams,” Academy of Management Journal 44, no. 5 (2001): 956–74.
discouraged by our teammates Sigal G. Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2002): 644–75; Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, “Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 3 (2001): 80–91; Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, “Group Emotional Intelligence and Its Influence on Group Effectiveness,” in The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace: How to Select for, Measure, and Improve Emotional Intelligence in Individuals, Groups and Organizations, ed. Cary Cherniss and Daniel Goleman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 132–55; Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, “The Emotional Reality of Teams,” Journal of Organizational Excellence 21, no. 2 (2002): 55–65; William A. Kahn, “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work,” Academy of Management Journal 33, no. 4 (1990): 692–724; Tom Postmes, Russell Spears, and Sezgin Cihangir, “Quality of Decision Making and Group Norms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80, no. 6 (2001): 918; Chris Argyris, “The Incompleteness of Social-Psychological Theory: Examples from Small Group, Cognitive Consistency, and Attribution Research,” American Psychologist 24, no. 10 (1969): 893; James R. Larson and Caryn Christensen, “Groups as Problem-Solving Units: Toward a New Meaning of Social Cognition,” British Journal of Social Psychology 32, no. 1 (1993): 5–30; P. Wesley Schultz et al., “The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 429–34.
put her on guard In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Julia Rozovsky wrote: “This is how the study group felt from time to time. Not consistently.”
equally successful group In comments sent in response to fact-checking questions, a Google spokeswoman wrote: “We wanted to test many group norms that we thought might be important. But at the testing phase we didn’t know that the how was going to be more important than the who. When we started running the statistical models, it became clear that not only were the norms more important in our models but that 5 themes stood out from the rest.”
Boston hospitals Amy C. Edmondson, “Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 32, no. 1 (1996): 5–28; Druskat and Wolff, “Group Emotional Intelligence,” 132–55; David W. Bates et al., “Incidence of Adverse Drug Events and Potential Adverse Drug Events: Implications for Prevention,” Journal of the American Medical Association 274, no. 1 (1995): 29–34; Lucian L. Leape et al., “Systems Analysis of Adverse Drug Events,” Journal of the American Medical Association 274, no. 1 (1995): 35–43.