People like good working relationships and actively seek them out! This idea has clear implications for team building and team effectiveness. By combining this with 4G and the ability to predict relationships, I think there are some interesting new ideas for those who are concerned with productivity and team performance.
Ken Thompson drew my attention to a piece of research published by the Harvard Business Review. 'Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools and the formation of social networks' talks about 4 archetypes within business and people's preference for working with each one of them. This paper has also been picked up by the Monster Blog, Friends at Work and Fair and Biased, Co-workers: Lovable fools or Competent Jerks? The four types are;
Lovable Star - Competent and Likeable!
Lovable Fool - Likeable but competency issues
Competent Jerk - Competent but likeability question
Incompetent Jerk - Neither Competent nor Likeable!
From the article, it was found that
If someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer.
This point raises two questions in my mind. Firstly, given people's preference to work with those they enjoy, I firmly believe that the ability to empower individuals and teams with this information and to have them and the organisation work on them leads to significant improvements across the board. The following diagram from 4G provides a good case in point.
The team above highlights those who are likeable and those who are not. For example, encouraging Paulo and Susannah or Jim and Kate to foster a closer working relationship is to the benefit of themselves and the team. In the same vein, being able to predict the quality of these relationships then gives HR or management a clear basis for decision making and ensuring that people, where possible, work with those who they like. From a 4G standpoint, predicting relationships within teams is possible via the use of Social Relationships.
The second point is how do people react to those team members or employees who are both incompetent and likeable?
