Structure Before Process

What it is

The name is this publication's rather than any book's. Colin Fisher describes the principle at length in The Collective Edge and never gives it a label, so one is supplied here and the fact is stated.

Hackman's framing of leadership as creating conditions rather than causing outcomes is the same claim stated at the level of a leader's job. The design features in question are the ones a team is built with: whether it is a real team with stable membership, whether it has a compelling direction, whether the task is genuinely interdependent, whether information and rewards reach the team rather than individuals.

The anchor is Wageman's field research at Xerox, reported in Organization Science in 2001 and carried into the 2005 theory paper. Team design features controlled a large share of the variance in team performance, close to two fifths, against less than one per cent for the quality of leaders' coaching. On the level of self-management the split was over two fifths for design against under a tenth for coaching. The figures, the direction and the credit are all right, which cannot be said for most numbers in most trade books.

In effect

The second pillar is a 2007 meta-analysis by Stephen Humphrey, Jennifer Nahrgang and Frederick Morgeson, covering two hundred and fifty-nine studies and more than two hundred thousand people, which found that fourteen work characteristics explained on average a substantial share of the variance across nineteen worker attitudes and behaviours. Fisher's book introduces that study three times without naming its first author or its year.

The practical reading is that a manager's first question about an underperforming team should be a design question rather than a behaviour question. Is this a real team, with a real task, a stable membership and a reason to be interdependent? Coaching a group that fails those tests is working against the structure rather than with it.

What it does not say

It does not rest on the sample usually implied. The design and coaching figures come from Wageman's 2001 study of thirty-four self-managing teams at Xerox, cross-sectional, in one company. The figure of roughly a hundred and fifty technician groups that circulates alongside them belongs to her separate 1995 study on interdependence. Real support, thin base.

It does not carry the meta-analysis at the level people use it. The share of variance explained is an average across nineteen outcomes at the level of individual worker attitudes and behaviours, not a single figure for team performance, and the components are uneven, from a couple of per cent for turnover perceptions up to around two fifths for organisational commitment. The number is real and the framing usually built around it is broader than the paper's own.

It does not come with a ratio. The split of effort between structure, launch and coaching that Fisher gives at page 219 was not established by this publication's verification pass as an empirical result rather than a teaching heuristic, and it is not repeated here as a finding. Two further percentages at page 39 could not be matched to the paper's components and are not carried either.

It does not say design is always available. Most people inheriting a team cannot redesign it, which is why the coaching literature exists at all, and the Xerox result is one field setting in one company with one kind of work. The direction of effect may not hold where the task is ambiguous or the team is short lived.

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