Building Resilience Through Vulnerability: The Effects of Team Disclosure and Team Cohesion on Resilient Team Performance

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Bradley Kirkman

Poole College of Management, USA

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

Abstract

Given strong norms for professionalism and concerns that openly discussing intimate beliefs, experiences, emotions, and identities with work colleagues could leave one vulnerable to adverse judgment, many employees likely exercise caution regarding their workplace self-disclosures. However, research on non-work relationships suggests that self-disclosure, when reciprocated, has positive effects on relationship development and maintenance. We contend that these effects could be particularly beneficial for interdependent work teams facing adversity in today’s increasingly volatile business environments. Specifically, we integrate self-expansion theory with research on team resilience to develop and test a serial mediation model in which team disclosure—the extent to which team members engage in intimate and vulnerable acts of revealing personal information about themselves to one another—builds team cohesion. During adversity, we predict that team cohesion reduces action process loss, which ultimately leads to resilient team performance. Across two studies using experimental and nonexperimental methods, we find support for our theoretical model. In Study 1, we assessed a field sample of work teams and their supervisors both before and soon after COVID-19 began. We found that teams engaging in more team disclosure prior to the pandemic experienced greater cohesion, which subsequently translated into more resilient team performance during the pandemic. In Study 2, we manipulated team disclosure and triggered an adversity in a controlled laboratory experiment using student teams. Teams in the disclosure condition, compared to those in a control condition, developed greater team cohesion, which led to less action process loss and more resilient team performance following adversity.