'Are Your Team Members Lonely?' Winner of MIT Sloan Management Review 2022 Beckhard Prize

Constance N. Hadley and Mark Mortensen win award for best MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 13, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the editors of MIT Sloan Management Review announced that Constance N. Hadley and Mark Mortensen are the winners of the 2022 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the authors of the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development published in the winter 2021 through fall 2021 issues.

MIT SMR awarded the prize for the article "Are Your Team Members Lonely?" from the winter 2021 issue. Hadley is an organizational psychologist and lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. Mortensen is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.

The prize-winning article results from two studies involving nearly 500 global executives, along with informal interviews with other managers. The authors found that workplace teams are changing in today's organizations, and they are now less likely to be relatively stable, with long-lasting group member roles underpinned by close working relationships. Teams have not only become ever present in our work lives but have also grown in number and scope and become more flexible, less stable, and more time-pressed. The result is that we are often "alone together" in the organization.

The authors assert that loneliness or the lack of social connections is often thought of as an individual issue, but in organizations, it is also a structural one that can emerge from the composition, duration, and staffing of teams. Four features of current team design foster such disconnection: fluid membership, with rapid turnover in team composition; modularized roles, with members chosen for discrete skills the team requires; part-time commitment such that members can serve on many teams simultaneously; and short duration, with teams forming for short periods before disbanding. Such scenarios tend to promote transactional, limited, and shallow relationships among members.

"The authors' call for managers to exercise more responsibility for the well-being of employees and their social interconnections would resonate with Dick Beckhard," the judges say. "He was a strong advocate for the use of diverse teams in organizations and was keenly aware of the features that encourage and discourage positive intrateam dynamics."

The authors advise monitoring feelings of loneliness among employees. Leaders might create what the authors call core teams, with longer durations, stable membership, low turnover, common affinities or interests, and a shared work location.

This year's panel of judges consisted of distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty: Kate Kellogg, the David J. McGrath Jr. Professor of Management and Innovation; John Van Maanen, the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management, Emeritus; and David Robertson, a senior lecturer in operations management.

One of the founders and architects of the field of organizational development, Professor Richard Beckhard was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years. A longtime friend of MIT Sloan Management Review, Beckhard was known for his efforts to help organizations function in a more humane and high-performing manner and to empower people to be agents of change.

At MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT SMR), we explore how leadership and management are transforming in a disruptive world. We help thoughtful leaders capture the exciting opportunities — and face down the challenges — created as technological, societal, and environmental forces reshape how organizations operate, compete, and create value.

Tess Woods
[email protected]

SOURCE MIT Sloan Management Review