Behind the Blame Game – the Individual or the Group?

In this, the second of two articles looking at why some individuals in teams underperform, I’m going to explore the role of the individual within a group dynamic, and why sometimes it’s the group causing the dysfunction and not that ‘troublesome individual’.

In the first article (click here), I explored the 5 elements of a role that must be defined before an individual can be held accountable for their performance. Whilst it's a sound foundation on which to look at the situation, it's also a very ‘systemic’ definition of role performance – by which I mean it's based on the role as an element or cog within the wider organisation. Like one machine in a factory line that breaks down irrespective of the others. When considered exclusively, it risks not only dehumanising the situation but also missing the wider context of how groups function or don’t function.

To do this we need to take a psychodynamic perspective – considering the role of human behaviour in how a team works together and can exert an unspoken or unconscious pressure on an individual. This pressure might be to fulfil a certain role or to demonstrate a behaviour on behalf of the group.

To explain this I’m going to use two perspectives on the same scenario – the first focusing on leadership and authority, and the second on the impact of wider organisational task anxiety.

Here's the scenario - a football team sell their popular star striker for a tidy profit and buy an up-and-coming youngster for the next season. The team are not consulted but express their understanding of how the football market works and wish their friend the best for his new opportunity. They welcome the youngster and make a real effort to befriend them and teach them the play book. However, three matches into the season the youngster has failed to score, botching a number of clear chances, and the captain tells the manager that the team think it’s not going to work.

Systemically we would say that the new striker has a clear role, with defined objectives, and the resources they need to deliver (seeing as the previous striker was successful) – so clearly the new player is not up to the job, right?

Psychodynamically, we see other elements at play. We see the issue of delegated authority without accompanying power, with the captain being undermined by the manager’s lack of consultation over the sale. The captain has been delegated a leadership role but clearly not the authority to make decisions – he therefore needs another way of expressing his power. The new striker’s ‘lack of performance’ provides the captain, consciously or unconsciously, with an opportunity to demonstrate this.

That the captain speaks on behalf of the team is another clue. It suggests that the rest of the team show dependency on the captain whose role, their actions suggest, is to provide for them and so they become passive and inactive. The striker was joining a team who may consciously have welcomed them, but unconsciously looked for his or her failure – and most probably contributed to it.

How leadership and authority is delegated and taken up within a team and, crucially, within the wider organisation, influences much group behaviour. The outcome may be poor individual performance, but the input (and solution) lies with the unconscious ripple from how leaders and followers take up their roles.

Now let’s look at the same scenario through the lens of organisational task anxiety. Yes there are individual anxieties around job security at play, but there is also an organisational anxiety caused by, for example, the need for the team to win but also win playing a certain way. Both Manchester United and Spurs can be seen to have struggled over recent seasons with this double expectation – to win trophies but to do so playing creative and attacking football.

The pressure that this exerts on everyone - from the owner, to the manager, to the scout, to the players, and even to the fans – can have an impact on the collective unconscious. This has been perfectly described by Christopher Bollas as the unthought known – something that is known but somehow unable to be actively or consciously thought about, usually due to the intractability of the situation.

Where the above situation exists, it will often present itself in loop behaviour. This is where despite changes to personnel and strategy, the same organisational behaviours repeat themselves.

In our football scenario, the club is demonstrating pairing behaviour where they unconsciously look outside the group for the solution to this ‘win with flair’ conundrum. The whole football club have unconsciously placed their hopes for a solution to their organisational task anxiety on an external salvation – the new player who miraculously delivers against both objectives. On this one individual are placed the whole clubs’ anxieties and expectations. Of course, the individual is doomed to failure, and so the cycle repeats.

It doesn’t take much imagination to translate this scenario into the workplace. The majority of companies have multiple objectives that if not directly conflicting, certainly don’t support each other. Think of the marketing agency that is expected to show increased margin alongside creative awards. Or the manufacturer trying to marry a premium product with increasing profit targets and rising costs. The organisational anxiety this causes has to leak out somewhere - often through blaming one person.

Hopefully through both these articles, I’ve demonstrated that the net needs to be cast far wider when considering an individual’s performance. The solution lies in an integrative perspective that takes into account both the structural and behavioural elements of organisation, group and individual challenges.