Why Teams Strike Out Along Faultlines: Lessons from Jane Elliott and Baseball
The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a white third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa decided to conduct an exercise with her students. All of them were white. She separated the class into blue eyed kids and brown eyed kids. All the blue eyed kids were asked to wear a collar, so it could be determined from afar that they were indeed blue eyed. The teacher explained that blue eyed kids were not as good or smart as the brown eyed ones. Blue eyed kids couldn’t drink from the water fountain, had five minutes less recess time and weren’t allowed to play with brown eyed kids.
Within minutes, former friends became enemies. Blue eyed kids were upset with their unfair treatment, which was now inescapable. At every turn, the teacher reminded the class that each mistake a blue eyed kid made was due to the color of their eyes. Some brown eyed kids used their superior position to bully the blue eyed ones. Then the next school day, the teacher reversed the superior and inferior roles. On day two, the blue eyed kids gave their collars to the brown eyed kids. So the brown eyed students now had to endure their inferior status. Everything that they had done to their peers the day before was now being done to them.
After the second day, the teacher, Jane Elliott, asked her class how they felt. What does discrimination feel like? “I felt like a dog on a leash,” and “like I was in prison and they’re throwing the key away.” What did it feel like to be “superior”? “I felt like a king, like I was better than them, I was happy.” Finally, Elliott allowed the students to throw their collars away. They leapt with joy and raced to the trash can. Some spent a long while ripping the collar to shreds with their hands and teeth.
Elliott conducted this blue eye/brown eye experiment again the next year. This time, she gave her students math, spelling and reading tests before, during and after each experiment. Students in the “inferior” position received scores below their baseline pre-experiment levels. Since less was expected of them, they performed poorly during the experiment. However, all students’ scores increased after the experiment — beyond their baseline pre-experiment levels.
Why would a deeper understanding of discrimination lead to higher test scores? To confirm that her methods and results were valid, Elliott sent her findings to Stanford University. Researchers confirmed that something unique was happening when the students realized what discrimintation felt like. Elliott posited that “suddenly, kids find out how really great they are, and are responding now to what they know they are able to do.”
Faultline theory helps unravel the mystery behind Elliott’s students’ higher test scores. Divisions within groups, or faultlines, can be flashpoints for internal conflict and therefore affect overall group performance. When group divisions are stronger, like the antagonistic “us versus them” setup in Elliott’s experiment, those groups have strong faultlines. When divisions are weaker amongst group members, groups have weaker faultlines. Weaker faultline groups perform better than those with strong faultlines, or internal divisions. It makes sense that the students’ test scores would be higher than their pre-experiment scores because students had a stronger sense of togetherness after being artificially turned against each other. The group had weaker faultlines after the experiment. Years later, Elliott and her students reconnected at a school reunion. Her former students, now adults, said they felt like family after the experiment. “After the exercise is over, we can find out what society could be if we really believed all the stuff we preach…you create instant cousins,” explained Elliott.
Researchers Bezrukova, Spell, Caldwell and Burger analyzed how faultlines impact group performance by looking at 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams from 2004 to 2008. Each baseball team is made up of four groups: starting pitchers, relief pitchers, starting position players and backup position players. So their total sample size for the study was 584 groups.
Bezrukova et al chose to study MLB teams because the teams have demographic diversity which creates a fertile environment for faultlines to arise. Teams also share standardized metrics for success — individual players can hit a home run and the team can win or lose as a group. Those factors allow researchers to compare team performance against their faultline levels. Bezrukova et al explain that faultlines “occur when multiple attributes (e.g., race, age) of group members come into alignment and divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups.” For example, a team faultline can occur between young Latino players and older white players. Two exclusive cliques, or subgroups, form. These subgroups may have their own goals that distract from the overall team goal. They might put their own subgroup’s interest ahead of the team’s best interest. Faultline rifts cause team cohesion to fall apart.
Over the 30 teams, players ranged in age from 18 to 45 years old. While 78% were born in the United States, the remainder came from 25 other nations. Race was split at 59% white, 33% Hispanic and 8% African American (see Note). All of these categories — age, nationality and race — shape the way we see ourselves and how others categorize us. Faultlines form along those category divisions and can be clearer or muddled, depending on the group’s makeup. The more defined the subgroup is, the clearer the behavioral associations will be for that subgroup. Those behaviors can be externally defined, like Elliott did when prescribing “inferior” qualities to blue eyed students. Or internally defined, what each member decides to do as part of their subgroup. If a subgroup is less defined, then the faultline is weaker. For example, if there are both younger white and African American players in addition to older white players on the same team, then the faultline is less clear.
Bezrukova et al found that teams with strong faultlines performed worse than teams who had weaker faultlines. When people see faultlines amongst their group “the chance for conflict or other dysfunction increases.” Baseball teams that are divided along these lines, just like Elliott’s divided students, fight with each other. Increased internal conflict lowers team performance. As internal conflict levels rose within baseball teams, the further divided the teams became along faultlines.
Bezrukova et al’s research shows that internal conflict is not beneficial to teams when strong faultlines are present. Teams with less internal conflict weren’t as impacted when their faultlines became stronger, or more defined. Whereas teams with more internal conflict experienced a sharp drop in performance as their internal subgroups, or faultlines, became more defined.
We know from Q theory that it is important to have the right balance of different perspectives within a team. That’s what sparks creativity and innovation. However, diverse perspectives also create the potential for internal conflict, which leads to lower team performance. But this isn’t an impossible situation. Differences don’t need to be ignored or destroyed in an effort to destroy faultlines. The solution is quite the opposite.
Effective leaders create an environment where differences are celebrated, discussed openly and used to benefit the group as a whole. This healthy internal conflict in a weak faultline setting is a catalyst for group progress. Sparks fly, innovation results, the group progresses because of the friction.
Can you think of a situation where healthy internal conflict on your team led to group progress? Let us know in the comments.
Note:
Hispanic refers to Spanish speaking people living in the United States. Whether or not Hispanic is considered a racial category rather than an ethnic category is still up for debate. We keep the term here to reflect the research accurately. Bezrukova et al refer to Latino players throughout the research, yet in the race categories they use Hispanic.
