Gain inside insight to help team leaders and team members maximize their success in business. 

Making the Team: A Guide for Managers  combines cutting-edge theory with the latest research and real-world applications in order to help team leaders and team members succeed in the business world. 

Every chapter of the fourth edition contains new information, new research, updated examples, and more.

Two studies utilized firsthand accounts from survivors of two major natural disasters—Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Chilean earthquake in 2010—to investigate (1) how people make sense of their disaster experiences and (2) who understands these events in religious terms. We found that describing the disasters as an act of God was among the most common explanations. Moreover, the degree to which survivors encountered extreme hardship—unpredictable, disruptive, and uncontrollable experiences—predicted explanations of the events as an act of God. These findings held even after controlling for demographic factors (educational attainment and race/ethnicity) known to be associated with religiosity. Notably, objective experiences (e.g., seeing dead bodies) were better predictors of religious meaning-making than relatively subjective psychological reactions to those experiences (e.g., fear). These studies extend the literature by examining how experiences of hardship in real-world contexts underlie religious meaning-making and suggest that religiosity emerges, in part, from variation in individual experience.

American universities increasingly admit first-generation students—students whose parents do not have four-year degrees. Once admitted, these students experience greater challenges adjusting to universities compared to continuing-generation students—students who have at least one parent with a four-year degree. This additional adversity is typically explained in terms of first-generation students' relative lack of economic (e.g., money) or academic (e.g., preparation) resources. We propose that this adversity also stems from a cultural mismatch between the mostly middle-class, independent norms institutionalized in American universities and the relatively interdependent norms that first-generation students are socialized with in working-class contexts before college. As predicted, an experiment revealed that framing the university culture in terms of independent norms (cultural mismatch) led first-generation students to show greater increases in cortisol and less positive/more negative emotions than continuing-generation students while giving a speech. However, reframing the university culture to include interdependent norms (cultural match) eliminated this gap.

This article brings together research on philanthropy, family business, and governance to examine patterns of giving by U.S. family versus nonfamily independent foundations. The authors use a sample comprising the 200 largest U.S. independent foundations in 2007 to show that family foundations are more focused in their grantmaking than nonfamily foundations. Board size moderates this relationship. They also offer a new typology of family foundations to show that the generation stage of the family and the foundation board’s composition are associated with different levels of grantmaking diversity in family foundations but in dissimilar ways. Scholarly and practical implications are discussed.

Though the scientific study of social class is over a century old, theories regarding how social class shapes psychological experience are in their infancy. In this review, we provide a road map for the empirical study of an emerging psychology of social class. Specifically, we outline key measurement issues in the study of social class—including the importance of both objective indicators and subjective perceptions of social class—as well theoretical insights into the role of the social class context in influencing behavior. We then summarize why a psychology of social class is likely to be a fruitful area of research and propose that social class environments guide psychological experience because they shape fundamental aspects of the self and patterns of relating to others. Finally, we differentiate social class from other rank-relevant states (e.g., power) and social categories (e.g., race/ethnicity), while also outlining potential avenues of future research.

Despite the popularity of diversity management, there is little consensus on how to design diversity practices that work. In this article, the author provides an inside look into one type of diversity practice: diversity recruitment. Drawing on qualitative evidence from hiring in elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms, the author analyzes what diversity recruitment looks like in these firms in theory and in practice. The author finds that although these firms tend to have the ingredients for success on paper, in practice the presence of structural and status divides between those responsible for overseeing diversity recruitment and those making hiring decisions, alongside widespread cultural beliefs among decision-makers that diversity is not a valid criterion of evaluation, stymies firms’ efforts to diversify. The author’s findings highlight that to be successful in translating diversity programs into results, those charged with overseeing diversity programs need not only formal organizational authority but also sufficient informal power and status to wield influence.

This case describes a newly promoted middle manager in a global, multi-cultural organization who is challenged by a number of factors in the workplace which are impacting her and her team’s ability to perform to the expectations of her regional manager. While it would be easy to blame the new manager, deeper analysis in fact reveals that many forces are at work here in addition to her inexperience including communication of strategy and performance objectives, mismanaged team members, cultural inconsistencies, and a lack of leadership direction and/or skill from the very top to her supervising manager.

This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often-suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers’ hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers and participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about productivity alone. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.

The present research tested whether incidental exposure to money affects people’s endorsement of social systems that legitimize social inequality. We found that subtle reminders of the concept of money, relative to nonmoney concepts, led participants to endorse more strongly the existing social system in the United States in general (Experiment 1) and free-market capitalism in particular (Experiment 4), to assert more strongly that victims deserve their fate (Experiment 2), and to believe more strongly that socially advantaged groups should dominate socially disadvantaged groups (Experiment 3). We further found that reminders of money increased preference for a free-market system of organ transplants that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor even though this was not the prevailing system (Experiment 5) and that this effect was moderated by participants’ nationality. These results demonstrate how merely thinking about money can influence beliefs about the social order and the extent to which people deserve their station in life.

Metacognition is cognition about cognition, thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing, and feeling about thinking (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Petty, Brinol, Tormala, & Wegener, 2007; Schwarz, Sanna, Skurnik, & Yoon, 2007). In the case of teams and groups, metacognition is team members thinking about how their team processes information, works on problems, and feels about the team process (Hinsz, 2004; Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997). Similarly, the the case of organizations, metacognition is members of organizations thinking about how their organization functions and feels about the way their organization functions. We use the distinction between primary and secondary cognition to guide out review (Petty et al., 2007). Primary thoughts are those that occur at a direct level of cognition and involve people's initial associations. Following a primary thought, people can also generate secondary thoughts (i.e., metacognitions) that occur as reflections on the first-level thoughts or the processes that generated the primary thoughts. In their review, we focus on people's cognitions and feelings about groups, teams, and their organizations. We situate our review with regard to people as they interact with and work in teams and business organizations, as opposed to people cognizing about crowds or aggregates with whom they have no social or organizational relationship. Unfortunately, literature search using the phrases "metacognition and organizations," "metacognitions and teams," and "metacognition and groups" yielded very little (see Hinsz, 2004, for an exception). Yet, organizational behavior (OB) researchers resonate to the idea that managers, leaders, and their teams contemplate their thinking, behavior, and each other. Our thesis is that metacognition is alive and well in OB; it simply operates under a variety of banners (including transactive memory, shared mental models, group reflexivity, and so on) that paradoxically do not recognize one another. Throughout our review, we explore the following questions: Does metacognition help or hurt teams? Do metacognitive processes naturally emerge and develop or are they something that can be taught, leveraged, and trained?

Three studies contrasting Indian and American negotiators tested hypotheses derived from theory proposing why there are cultural differences in trust and how cultural differences in trust influence negotiation strategy. Study 1 (a survey) documented that Indian negotiators trust their counterparts less than American negotiators. Study 2 (a negotiation simulation) linked American and Indian negotiators’ self-reported trust and strategy to their insight and joint gains. Study 3 replicated and extended Study 2 using independently-coded negotiation strategy data, allowing for stronger causal inference. Overall, the strategy associated with Indian negotiators’ reluctance to extend interpersonal (as opposed to institutional) trust produced relatively poor outcomes. Our data support an expanded theoretical model of negotiation, linking culture to trust, strategies, and outcomes.

The present work provides evidence that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. It also demonstrates that this bias is rooted in perceptions of status and the privilege (or hardship) status confers, not race per se. Archival data from the National Football League injury reports reveal that, relative to injured White players, injured Black players are deemed more likely to play in a subsequent game, possibly because people assume they feel less pain. Experiments 1–4 show that White and Black Americans–including registered nurses and nursing students–assume that Black people feel less pain than do White people. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 provide evidence that this bias is rooted in perceptions of status, not race per se. Taken together, these data have important implications for understanding racerelated biases and healthcare disparities.

Human beings have an unusual proclivity for altruistic behavior, and recent commentators have suggested that these prosocial tendencies arise from our unique capacity to understand the minds of others (i.e., to mentalize). The current studies test this hypothesis by examining the relation between altruistic behavior and the reflexive engagement of a neural system reliably associated with mentalizing. Results indicated that activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—a region consistently involved in understanding others’ mental states—predicts both monetary donations to others and time spent helping others. These findings address long-standing questions about the proximate source of human altruism by suggesting that prosocial behavior results, in part, from our broader tendency for social-cognitive thought.

The literature on social class disparities in health and education contains 2 underlying, yet often opposed, models of behavior: the individual model and the structural model. These models refer to largely unacknowledged assumptions about the sources of human behavior that are foundational to research and interventions. Our review and theoretical integration proposes that, in contrast to how the 2 models are typically represented, they are not opposed, but instead they are complementary sets of understandings that inform and extend each other. Further, we elaborate the theoretical rationale and predictions for a third model: the sociocultural self model of behavior. This model incorporates and extends key tenets of the individual and structural models. First, the sociocultural self model conceptualizes individual characteristics (e.g., skills) and structural conditions (e.g., access to resources) as interdependent forces that mutually constitute each other and that are best understood together. Second, the sociocultural self model recognizes that both individual characteristics and structural conditions indirectly influence behavior through the selves that emerge in the situation. These selves are malleable psychological states that are a product of the ongoing mutual constitution of individuals and structures and serve to guide people’s behavior by systematically shaping how people construe situations. The theoretical foundation of the sociocultural self model lays the groundwork for a more complete understanding of behavior and provides new tools for developing interventions that will reduce social class disparities in health and education. The model predicts that intervention efforts will be more effective at producing sustained behavior change when (a) current selves are congruent, rather than incongruent, with the desired behavior and (b) individual characteristics and structural conditions provide ongoing support for the selves that are necessary to support the desired behavior.

Although risk assessments are critical inputs to economic and organizational decision-making, we lack a good understanding of the social and political causes of shifts in risk perceptions and the consequences of those changes. This article uses social movement theory to explain the effect of environmental activism on corporations’ perceived environmental risk and actual financial performance. We define environmental risk as audiences’ perceptions that a firm’s practices or policies will lead to greater potential for an environmental failure or crisis that would expose it to financial decline. Using data on environmental activism targeting U.S. firms between 2004 and 2008, we examine variation in the effectiveness of secondary and primary stakeholder activism in shaping perceptions about environmental risk. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that primary stakeholder activism against a firm affects its perceived environmental risk, which subsequently has a negative effect on the firm’s financial performance.