Modern organizations must prioritize teamwork and cooperation to achieve success and meet business goals. And yet, the best way to facilitate cooperation within a team is not always obvious. This article describes the neuroscience behind teamwork and cooperation to help organizations reach their potential. Moreover, it describes the science which underlies the technology of ThinkAlike Laboratories, LLC to optimize organizations.
Neural synchrony is key to understanding cooperation and teamwork within organizations. When neural synchrony occurs, the neurons of one person’s brain fire at the same rate and in the same location as the neurons in another person’s brain. This coupling between individuals has only recently been studied, and it reveals remarkable truths about social cooperation.
Researchers have recently increased their focus on neural synchrony, especially in regard to group performance. New studies show that people perform better on group tasks when their brains are more synchronized, and researchers can even predict team performance based on their level of neural synchrony¹.
Other studies found a strong correlation between neural synchrony and cooperative behavior, showing that higher neural synchrony leads to higher cooperation between individuals². Researchers have also demonstrated that when two people engage in interactive decision-making tasks, they increase the synchronization between their brains³. In these ways, neural synchrony reflects performance and cooperation within a team.
To reap the benefits of neural synchrony within a team, an organization must facilitate neural synchrony among its team members. There are several ways to achieve this. For example, team members can communicate verbally or face-to-face to enhance neural synchrony. Other studies have people assign themselves a team name or engage in synchronized hand-tapping to generate a sense of group identity, which facilitates neural synchrony¹.
Moreover, neural synchrony correlates with social connectedness⁶,⁷, where people who are more closely connected (such as romantic partners or friends) tend to exhibit higher neural synchrony than people who are less closely connected (such as strangers). This suggests that informal social bonds can drive neural synchrony for an organization.
Conversely, competition tends to reduce neural synchrony⁸, suggesting that a culture of cooperation rather than competition is vital to team performance. These findings indicate that social cohesion and cooperation are important factors for inducing neural synchrony and enhancing team performance.
The current research on neural synchrony strongly suggests that social cohesion, cooperation, and group identity are vital to increase team performance. By implementing these findings, an organization can change its team for the better. For instance, research shows that neural synchrony is increased between managers and employees when a qualitative (i.e., word-based) rather than a quantitative (i.e., numerical) rating system is used during performance reviews⁹.
This neural synchrony, in turn, drives a sense of empathy and interpersonal tuning between managers and employees. Furthermore, activities that drive neural synchrony, such as team-building tasks, may be implemented to develop a sense of team culture and unity. Overall, the research on neural synchrony may be implemented by individual teams to optimize performance.
As more research is performed on neural synchrony, organizations will better understand how to drive team performance through neuroscience. ThinkAlike Laboratories, LLC uses our patented methodology, Cross-Brain Correlation, to study neural synchrony across individuals to identify how people think and behave in common. To learn more about how our research can help your organization, contact one of our team members and follow our blog to stay up to date on the best ways to apply neuroscience to your team.
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