Too Much of a Good Thing? Negative Effects of High Trust and Individual Autonomy in Self-Managing Teams

Langfred · Trust & Interpersonal, Team Learning · Academy of Management Journal · 2004 · Paywalled

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Langfred argues that a high level of trust can make members of self-managing teams reluctant to monitor one another, which can hurt performance where individual autonomy is also high. In 71 teams of MBA students, high trust went with higher performance when individual autonomy was low but with lower performance when it was high, and the analysis pointed to monitoring as the route.

Two cohorts at a Midwestern business school were assigned to four-person teams designed for diversity and worked together for four months, with complete discretion over how to work; 248 of 300 students responded. The survey was taken in the week of a closing case competition and asked about it. Performance was the mean of at least six judges' ratings on six dimensions.

Trust was a four-item scale based on Simons and Peterson (2000) including 'We trust each other a lot in my team' and 'I know I can count on the other team members'. It is one general measure, not separating cognition- from affect-based trust. Monitoring was members' reports of checking on one another, such as 'We monitor each others progress on team projects'. Autonomy was three items on deciding how and when to do one's own work.

Trust and monitoring were negatively related (beta -.71), with a significant squared term fitting a concave downward curve. Trust and autonomy interacted to predict performance; once the monitoring by autonomy interaction was added, that term was no longer significant, and Langfred concludes 'it appears that the expected mediation does occur'. Teams with low monitoring and high autonomy performed worst. His reasons for the drop in monitoring, such as wanting to be seen as a 'team player', fear of sanction and worry that proposing checks would read as a breach of trust, are argued, not measured, and with no manager-led teams sampled, the contrast with them is untested.

He notes a possible restriction of range: trust and autonomy were generally high, so the study essentially compared moderate with very high trust; that the students were close in age at one university; and that cross-sectional data preclude inferences about causal direction, though he argues that months of joint work make fairly stable perceptions of trust likely. The practical point is not to avoid trust: with high individual autonomy, some monitoring needs to be in place, and 'a lack of monitoring can be naïve, regardless of levels of trust'.

The paper does not mention psychological safety, voice or challenge. The bridge is ours: on Langfred's argument, proposing a check grows riskier as trust rises, which separates trust from the safety to raise one; the study measured how much monitoring happened, not whether anyone held back.

Langfred, C.W. (2004) 'Too much of a good thing? Negative effects of high trust and individual autonomy in self-managing teams', Academy of Management Journal, 47(3), pp. 385–399.

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