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For fifteen weeks, on randomly chosen days, 345 engineers and scientists write down whom they spoke to about work. The response rate is 93%. These slips of paper become the basis for one of the best-known studies in team research. It puts numbers to a suspicion many leaders share: long-standing teams eventually become deaf to anything they did not come up with themselves. An example of the Team Principle of External Relationships.
One Lab, 50 Teams
Situation
Ralph Katz and Thomas J. Allen are researchers at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. They study the research and development facility of a large US corporation with about 735 professionals. They analyze 50 project groups from seven departmental labs. Managers in the company rate each project’s performance independently on a scale of one to seven – seven department heads and two lab directors, with an average of 4.7 ratings per project. They look at schedules and costs, degree of innovation, adaptability and cooperation. The ratings show high agreement. The working paper appears in 1980, the article in January 1982 in the journal “R&D Management.”
Connection to the team principle
The Team Principle of External Relationships says: A team that only looks inward loses what it needs from outside. The two researchers did not coin the phrase “Not Invented Here.” It had long been common in industry – as a jibe at groups that reject outside ideas. They do something else: they test whether there is anything to the jibe.
The Curve
Situation
The researchers sort the groups by how long their members have, on average, been working together. This yields five bands of ten groups each: under one and a half years, one and a half to just under two and a half, two and a half to just under three and a half, three and a half to just under five, and five years or more. The result is a curve. Performance rises at first. It peaks in groups that have been together for two to four years, at about 4.9 points. In groups that have been together five years or more, it is markedly lower, at about 4.1.
Connection to the team principle
The first half of the curve is good news: teams need time to become good. The second half is the warning. What makes a team strong – familiarity, set routines, a shared picture of the situation – can, over the years, close it off from the outside.
Where the Conversation Dries Up
Situation
Communication is recorded in six directions: within the project itself, within the department, within the lab, with other parts of the corporation, with professionals outside, and with suppliers. In the longer-standing groups, communication declines with tenure in three directions: within the project, with other parts of the company and with the professional world outside. The authors describe the syndrome like this: a stable group gradually comes to believe that it holds a monopoly on knowledge in its field and stops considering outside ideas at all.
Connection to the team principle
This is the heart of the matter. It is not the team’s age that does the damage but the silence that comes with age. It does not happen out of ill will. People who know each other well need to ask fewer questions. People who have often been right seek advice less often. So, step by step, a team loses what it needs from outside – and does not notice, because inside everything feels fine. Notably, communication within the team itself also declines.
The Antidote – and the Limits
Situation
The best scores come from groups whose members have been on board for differing lengths of time. So neither standstill nor wholesale replacement, but gradual turnover. The authors themselves name the limits of their work: they took a cross-section, not a longitudinal view over years. They studied a single company. And they cannot say what is cause and what is effect.
Connection to the team principle
The “five-year limit” is therefore not a law of nature. There is no cutoff point at which a team tips over. The study is useful as an early warning: the longer you work together unchanged, the more deliberately you have to cultivate contact with the outside. Honesty also means looking at the other side of the ledger. Boundary work has a cost. In a 2007 multilevel study, Jennifer A. Marrone, Paul E. Tesluk and Jay B. Carson found that people who do the boundary-spanning work for their team experience more role overload. When the whole team shares this work, the overload goes down. So the answer to “Not Invented Here” is not a single contact person who carries everything.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Do the math: how long has your team been working in the same lineup? The longer it has, the more important it becomes to look outward.
- Run the study’s test on a small scale. Have everyone note down for one week whom outside the team they talked to about work. Blank sheets are a signal.
- Ensure gradual turnover. One new member a year brings questions that no one on the team asks anymore.
- Spread external contacts across several people. Anyone who holds the bridge alone will be overloaded.
- Listen for the phrase “We’ve already tried that.” Ask: when, how and under what circumstances?
Summary
In 50 development teams at one corporation, Ralph Katz and Thomas J. Allen found a pattern: groups that had existed unchanged for five years or more talked less with one another, less with other parts of the company and less with the professional world – and received poorer ratings. The study does not prove causation and applies to a single company. But it shows the mechanism behind the Team Principle of External Relationships: a team that only looks inward loses what it needs from outside. The antidote is new people in moderation and external contacts carried by the whole team.