So, further into the dark side of teams, unfortunately, is that when teams form, they can also create hierarchies very easily which are based on a number of different things. But what it does is create the opportunity for people at the top to impose their will and their point of view on everybody else. And when it comes to creativity, you really want ideas to come from all levels of the organization, and what hierarchies can do is ensure that only the ideas that come from the top are legitimate and are worth sharing. You might not realize this or really intend for it to happen but groups form hierarchies very easily and quickly. Hierarchies can be based on power, which means that the people at the top have a valued resource and they can control people by granting it or withholding it from others. Hierarchies can also be based on status, which means that some people have more respect or prestige than others, other people like them and want to collaborate with them. Either way, people at the top of the hierarchy can make the people below them more obedient rather than rebellious, or non-conforming, or questioning, the kinds of behaviors that we really need for creative perspectives to be freely shared. The power of authority in obedience was illustrated in a classic study that I'm going to tell you about because it's still so powerful after all these years. Psychologist Stanley Milgram was curious why seemingly ordinary people can go along with such despicable acts, such as the bureaucrats who participated in the Holocaust in Nazi Germany in World War II. Many of them claimed they were just doing what they were told. And the question is, is that a thing of the past or an artifact of a particular time or place? It turns out that the tendency to obey authority is pretty universal. To make this point, Milgram invited participants to his lab to participate in a study of learning. The participants were told that they would be testing another participant in their ability to solve problems. This other person was seated on the other side of the screen and they were supposedly tethered to a machine that would deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity. The experimenter instructed the teacher to ask the learner one question, and if they got it wrong, the teacher would have to deliver a shock to the learner. And this was all done in the context of an experiment, remember? So the experimenter had authority here. And it turns out, however, that the person on the other side of the screen, the so-called learner, was actually working for the experimenter. They deliberately got the answer wrong and so the teacher was asked to give them shocks of higher and higher voltage. And the learner would actually pretend to scream in pain, and protest, and complain that at some point, even that the electric shocks were giving them chest pains and that they couldn't go on. But if the teacher refused to give a stronger shock, then the experimenter simply told them, "You must continue. The experiment requires that you continue." Shockingly, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist that, but almost 90 percent of the participants went all the way to the highest voltage, a lethal 425 volts of electricity. Ordinary people were willing to potentially kill someone at the orders of an experimenter they just met in a study of learning. So in other words, and this is where I think it's not only dark and disturbing but it's really telling us something important for creativity, but teams provide the context for this blind obedience to occur. Teams can have hierarchies that give enormous power to those at the top and the people below simply fall in line. That's not a path toward creativity, but really one that leads toward sort of blind conformity and obedience, and towing the line rather than rethinking perspectives. We learned that hierarchies could encourage obedience but it actually turns out that the pressure to fall in line hits the people in the middle of the hierarchy the hardest. This is a phenomenon called middle status conformity. And you've probably heard about it in the stereotypes of middle managers being these narrow-minded bureaucrats who shoot down new ideas and try to preserve the status quo. It's a pretty common stereotype but it turns out there's really a kernel of truth there. In fact, I did a study looking at the impact of having middle status on creativity, and it showed that people in the middle were really reluctant to voice creative ideas. And what I did was simple. We brought people into the lab and we actually just simply had them imagine a time where they either had high status, middle status, or low status in the team that they had worked on at some point in the past. And so, people were randomly assigned to consider themselves in one of those three situations, either having high status, middle status, or low status. And then we told them that they were about to interact with the team, and that before they interact with the team, they had to generate new solutions to a business problem. And so, they were given time to brainstorm. And what we found was that the people who thought of themselves as middle status not only generated fewer ideas, but those ideas were less divergent, they were less novel, and they were less creative. And so, putting people in this middle status situation really made them squeezed in the middle. And the reason is that the people in the middle have two motives they're concerned with. One is that they want to move up in the hierarchy, and to do that, they really feel like they have to behave themselves. If I follow all the rules, the people at the top will grant me the opportunity to move up. And so, they'll end up withholding their creative ideas to avoid criticism. If you want to behave yourself, you behave conservatively and you suggest less creative ideas. The other thing they're worried about is moving down. And so, if you're in the middle, you can actually go further down in the hierarchy. And so again, to avoid moving down, you want to play it safe. You want to suggest ideas that aren't easily criticized, and unfortunately, those ideas also tend to be the ones that are less creative. The upside that we found, though, is that people with middle status tended to be more detail-oriented, they were more careful, they were better able to separate out irrelevant information and focus on information that was really relevant for solving the problem. So in other words, they traded flexibility for focus, and they weren't more creative, but they were more detail-oriented and careful. And so again, hierarchies can hit some people pretty hard in terms of creativity. And the people in the middle, because they're squeezed between these two really divergent motives, they want to move up and they want to avoid moving down, end up being much less creative than their counterparts at the high or at the low end. So, the good side of leadership and developing hierarchies is we can coordinate, we can get things done, we can work together. The downside, as we've been seeing though, is that that gives us lots of reasons not to speak up, right? Especially in the middle. Yeah, so we're really faced with a tough trade-off, that we want coordination and good leadership but we also want ideas coming from from every direction.
