Enhancing Team Dynamics: LMX Theory, Cohesion, and Diversity

Posted on Mar 7, 2025 in Energy Resources, Fuels, and Explosives Engineering

Developing Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

Minimum requirements for a leader-member exchange:

Liking (Affect)

  • Customizing personal information in emails to different team members.
  • Chatting with members about personal matters to enhance the socio-emotional bond.
  • Relationship-building behaviors from leaders promote positive perceptions and increase the likelihood of followers seeing leaders as close.

Loyalty (Fostering Loyalty in a Virtual Setting)

  • Public support for members: Defending members who are being criticized enhances loyalty.
  • Effective virtual team leaders enhance team experiences by ensuring opportunities for learning, growth, contribution, and feeling integral to the team.
  • Building loyalty requires considering unique local environments each member faces, such as family situations.

Professional Respect

  • In virtual teams, synchronous coordination is challenging. Clear and specific task advice increases perceived professional competence.
  • Leaders should clarify each member’s responsibility in individual communication (emails, chats, calls).
  • Customized task advice guides individuals and enhances respect for leaders’ professional knowledge, identifying them as role models.

Increasing Team Cohesiveness

Based on research:

  • If possible, make the group smaller.
  • Encourage agreement with group goals!
  • Increase time members spend together (e.g., via workations).
  • Increase the status of the group and the perceived difficulty of joining.
  • Stimulate competition with other groups.
  • Give rewards to the group rather than to individual members.
  • Physically isolate the group.
  • Increase membership homogeneity.
  • Increase interaction among members.

Fault Lines: Potential Cohesion Killers

  • A fault line is a hypothetical dividing line that splits a group into two or more subgroups. Once activated, you have two groups within the same team.

Team Diversity

Surface-Level Diversity

Surface-level or “high visibility” diversity: Demographic characteristics, easily observed and measured. Can evoke individual prejudices, biases, or stereotypes, sometimes unconscious.

Deep-Level Diversity

Deep-level diversity: Less apparent diversity based on psychological features, including capabilities, personality traits, values, attitudes, preferences, and beliefs.

Hidden Diversity

Hidden diversity: Characteristics that can be concealed or revealed at the individual’s discretion, like sexual orientation, invisible disabilities, health status, neurodiversity, immigration status, and economic background, are hidden as well as deep-level.

Intersectionality

Deep diversity represents the unique aspects of a person that you cannot see, including how multiple aspects of diversity interact within a person. This is also known as intersectionality. How diverse are personalities even between the same person; what we are looking for if we want a diverse team working together.

Pros of Team Diversity

  • Varied perspectives: Different personal experiences and backgrounds bring a wider variety of perspectives.
  • Better problem-solving: Varied points of view result in a more well-rounded workforce, making people work more creatively and deliver higher quality work.
  • Larger audience: Commitment to equal opportunities boosts employer branding and helps capture a larger share of the market. If your organization has a target market that is more diverse, then you are more likely to have team diversity within your company.
  • Higher profits: Studies by McKinsey show that companies with high levels of racial and ethnic diversity are 33-35% more likely to outperform their industry averages financially.

Cons of Team Diversity

  • Conflict Management: It is more difficult to manage conflict.
  • Hard to leverage: It is hard to leverage the benefits of diversity in highly dynamic teams.
  • Time consuming

Groupthink

Groupthink occurs when a group that is made up of members who may actually be very competent and thus quite capable of making excellent decisions nevertheless ends up making a poor one as a result of a flawed group process and strong conformity pressures (Janis, 2007).

Groupthink describes a deterioration in an individual’s mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment as a result of group pressures.

Teams Susceptible to Groupthink

It happens most in groups where we have:

  • Clear, strong group identity. Teams strongly identified with the group.
  • Members hold a positive image of their group that they want to protect (e.g., working in NASA).
  • The group perceives a collective threat to this positive image.
  • Groups with LOW diversity or poorly managed diversity.

Groupshift

Groupshift is a phenomenon in which the initial positions of individual members change to adopt a more extreme position due to the influence of the group.

Possible Solutions for Groupthink

  • Have the information written down (anonymous).
  • Make sure everyone engages and consider their opinion.

Further Solutions

  • Monitor or reduce group size (individuals are likely to feel less personal responsibility when groups get larger than about 10 members).
  • Group leaders should play an impartial role, seek input from all members, and avoid expressing their own opinions, especially in the early stages of deliberation.
  • First focus on the negatives of a decision alternative for the group.
  • Appoint one group member to play the role of devil’s advocate.

Preventing Groupthink

  • Ask for feedback and opinions under a controversial topic. Ask for opinions that are contrary to yours.
  • Bring in another person to argue with the decision. The more important positions people have, the less likely people come from the outside to discuss what they say. This is a problem because the higher up position you have, the less diversity you have in your team, the more susceptible they are.