Team hierarchy: coordinating without creating blind spots
Clarifying authority is a common response to a team's coordination difficulties. But how can teams preserve timely decisions without making the leader's mistakes harder to correct?
What the literature establishes
Cameron Anderson and Courtney Brown (2010, Research in Organizational Behavior) examine the functions and dysfunctions of hierarchies in groups. Their review explains why ordering influence can facilitate coordination, while emphasising that the expected benefits are not consistent. In particular, a clear distribution of authority does not guarantee that influence rests with the people best qualified to address the problem at hand.
When coordination and risk increase together
Eric Anicich, Roderick Swaab and Adam Galinsky (2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) investigate hierarchical cultural values, drawing notably on Himalayan expeditions. In these data, such values are associated with both more summits reached and more deaths. The article considers two mechanisms: easier coordination and less open communication, which can have opposing consequences within the same team.
The premature conclusion
Inferring that hierarchy should be abolished would be as excessive as concluding that it improves performance. The result depends on what counts as success: reaching a target is insufficient if the risks incurred remain outside the assessment. The managerial question therefore concerns checks on authority, rather than its presence alone. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to transfer
A literature review is not a trial comparing two organisational charts, and expedition data do not demonstrate that changing hierarchy would produce the same effects in a department in Berne. Cultural values, formal authority and a leader's behaviour are distinct objects of study. Measuring decision speed alone would also obscure part of the problem: late corrections and warnings that received no follow-up.
A practical check in Berne
Within SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme, one possible test in Berne is to retain the designated decision-maker while requesting a reasoned objection from someone with relevant expertise before each important operational decision. In federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing, that objection might concern, respectively, a regulatory constraint, a health risk, a service outage or a technical non-conformity. During a four-week pilot, record the objection, the decision-maker's response and any corrections after implementation, then calculate the proportion of objections that received an explicit response before the decision. Also compare decision times and late corrections with those from a comparable earlier period: this monitoring tests a concrete check on authority without claiming to isolate a causal effect on its own. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Bern
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