This article is written by Lykke Margot Ricard, associate professor in innovation and technology management at the University of Southern Denmark. She is sharing thoughts originally developed with Jenny M Lewis, professor of public policy at the University of Melbourne, Australia

What is the link between team performance and innovation?

Scholars, business leaders and senior public servants alike have tried to answer that question for decades. While we still haven’t arrived at a consensus, most people today see trust as a key part of the equation.

Many scholars have argued that trust has a beneficial effect on collaboration. And in our studies on leadership styles related to innovation, also to some sort of altruism, in being perceived as willing to sacrifice self-interest for the benefit of the team’s performance.

Trust itself can be hard to define. One way to look at it is that trust manifests itself as an expectation that I have, that you won’t act selfishly and opportunistically only for your benefit, even if you had the opportunity to do so.

Trust is particularly important in situations where there are high levels of uncertainty, vulnerability, or risk

For this reason, trust is particularly important in situations where there are high levels of uncertainty, vulnerability, or risk – such as in new product development, new service innovation or even in times of crisis, where one needs to learn on the job. Trust is then a reciprocal relation as a trusted leader is also one who is willing to risk mistakes by employees.

Despite the key role trust plays, there have not been many studies that explicitly examine levels of trust in social networks or teams in public organisations, as it’s often simply assumed that trust happens naturally from network ties between individuals.

Where do you go for strategic information?

In a large study in Copenhagen and Rotterdam, carried out for the book Innovation in City Governments, my co-authors and I decided to look at this more deeply. Public leaders from directors, head of departments to team leaders and project managers (226) within Copenhagen and Rotterdam city governments were surveyed. Information was gathered on their network ties, and the level of trust and importance of each of these ties. We asked two relational questions:

  1. Work networks: Looking back over the last six months, who did you work with the most on projects in the municipality? (List up to five people either inside or outside the municipality)
  2. Strategic networks: Looking back over the last six months, who did you go to most when you wanted to get strategic information about something in the municipality (including background information not yet available in reports etc.)? (List up to five people either inside or outside the municipality)

After we had gotten a list of names from these questions, we asked five further questions focusing on who the identified people were: which department they were in, their formal position, their relationship (e.g. colleague, former colleague, friend etc.). Finally, we asked two “strength-of-tie questions”, namely: how much do you trust this person? (on a scale from 1-5, where 3 is neutral); and how important is this person for your decision making? (on a scale from 1-5, where 3 is neutral).

From this we identified a number of relationships between people in each city. In Copenhagen, we got 315 social work relations — [number of direct ties from reponsdent to their ‘go to’ persons] —. and 264 information relations, giving us information about who these people turn to for strategic information. In Rotterdam, our research yielded 315 social work relations and 326 strategic information network relations respectively.

We then aggregated and analysed this data. We wanted to measure the strengths of ties for both trust and importance, for each type of network relation and for each city. Based on this data we calculated mean score values for trust and importance regarding who goes to whom.

What we found in the study

Interestingly, we found there are higher levels of trust in the work networks than in the strategic information networks. However, while trust is lower in the strategic networks there is a higher level of importance in the strategic information network ties, meaning the respondents found these relationships more critical to their ability to make decisions.

We concluded that trust is related to relationships that are based on close and frequent working patterns within teams, whereas strategic information ties are more related to the traditional hierarchy of the organisation and the potential of people to “get things done”, rather than personal closeness and trust.

Building on existing theory, we used these results to focus on what kind of strength-of-ties matters in these networks, in order to learn from these types of relations: “work with on projects” and on who do you go to for “strategic information” and different strengths of these ties.

Creating space for trust

Before we look at how the strength of ties between people play a role, it’s worth stopping again to ask why trust is important.

In the literature on New Public Management, which is also called market governance, competition is generally seen as good for innovation, but Network Governance literature and previous public management and policy network studies found that when competition is reduced, organisations, teams and people are better able to solve complex problems. In addition, management and organisational studies have found that when people trust each other, they are more likely to share information and make the most of their different strengths to solve problems.

Results show a relationship between trust in colleagues and a positive effect on team performance, so the teams that were performing best were also those who had a shared feeling of psychological safety.

At the team level, Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson has showed how shared beliefs, values and perceptions provide individuals with psychological safety, meaning that it is okay to ask “stupid questions” or show ones vulnerability that there are areas, where one don’t have all the answers. This makes it possible for them to learn in situations with high levels of uncertainty, enabling them to take action and fail without embarrassment in front of their leader or colleagues – believing that their team/colleagues would provide a safe environment for individual risk taking at work.

Results show a relationship between trust in colleagues and a positive effect on team performance, so the teams that were performing best were also those who had a shared feeling of psychological safety.

The idea of psychological safety at work relates to social structures. These are the connections we have that are densely interconnected, meaning that several people all share links to each other — what you would call a close-knit group in layman’s terms. These strong ties in relation to the social capital — the network of relationships among people who work together in teams, enabling that organisation to work effectively, is the formula that we call “trust” among team members.

This provides individuals the re-assurance that they won’t be ridiculed when they “need to ask questions, seek help, and tolerate mistakes in the face of uncertainty — while team members and other colleagues watch”. This also fits with our finding that network and transformational leadership is very important for innovation capacity building.

Two leadership types: the “go to” leader for information, and the mediator

In summary, we know that the network positions held by public leaders, will either give them informal authority or constrain their actions. Their trust relationships and ability to “get things done” associated with these networks are also important, compounding their innovation capacity.

We found different types of network characteristics of importance to innovation.

Only a few “go to leaders” for strategic information were not interconnected by their alters (their go to people), meaning they had a diverse network with low redundancy in information among their connections, while more leaders were highly interconnected ( ie. had high redundancy among their connections with the odds of receiving much of the same information). Not surprisingly, this characteristic of a diverse strategic information network was also found among those who are innovation leaders in the administrations, and often had been working in the municipality for a few years. These leaders fit the theory of someone who has the capacity to be innovative, as they are in a position to gather as much diverse information as possible and to reduce redundant information, as managing the network takes time.

There’s no guarantee that well-connected leaders will also be good implementers

This is just one aspect of innovation, trust and leadership. Successful innovation also means implementation, and there’s no guarantee that well-connected leaders will also be good implementers. All we can claim here is that this leadership type — the highly connected and trustful — also appears to have some important characteristic of innovation capacity in his/her network

Another leadership type that emerged from our research is someone who is placed between two important “go to” leaders. These kinds of leaders act as brokers between their influential colleagues by acting as a conduit between the two, facilitating information both ways and to other colleagues. Because these leaders enjoy a high level of trust from their peers, subordinates and team members and they are also highly interconnected. This leadership type is important for the diffusion of innovation. High level of trust and interconnectivity, means this leader is likely to be efficient in also getting their message across.

Moreover, in earlier public leadership studies, we found that the network leadership style of including others in decisions and being open to new ideas to be perceived as highly important for innovation.

These insights about leadership in the public sector are helpful in dealing with crises where collaboration is necessary and in order to govern in fragmented, complex situations. — Lykke Margot Ricard

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