If you think that positive emotion has nothing to do with the success of organizations and groups, think again…  Some of the most empirically-based research being conducted today around group behavior is on the topic of ratio of positive-to-negative interactions.  With regard to marriage, teams, or even larger groups, highly complex mathematical models are being used to examine and predict group success and failure.  Research has determined specific combinations of ratios of positive-to-negative interactions that contribute to the most effective teams.  This is pretty fascinating stuff. 

Barbara L. Fredrickson, of The University of Michigan and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been leading this research and has found that over-weighting a group with negative emotion will impact the team, marriage or organization in a drastically negative way.  Success will not come easy, if at all; and if negativity tips too far, there is no recovery.

Here is how it works:  With ratios favoring negative-to-positive emotions, peoples’ behaviors become much more easily predictable and aimed at survival and status quo.  In the reverse scenario, where positive outweighs negative emotions, people are less predictable and this unpredictability (characteristic of positive states) over time, yields resilience that allows people to flexibly adapt to inevitable crises.

Fredrickson writes:

“Within married couples, greater marital happiness is associated with less predictability from moment to moment as spouses interact, and yet, over time, these marriages are the ones most likely
to last (Gottman, 1994).  Within business teams, higher levels of expressed positivity among group members have been linked to greater behavioral variability within moment-to-moment interactions as well as to long-range indicators of business success (Losada & Heaphy, 2004).  And within organizations, positive experiences have been linked to broader information processing strategies and greater variability in perspectives across organizational members as well as to organizational resilience in the face of threat (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003).”

These researchers have actually found specific ratios that are optimal to success within groups.  I won’t go into detail on these ratios as the equations are far more complex than most of you care to read.  However, I can tell you that a little negativity is good.  Negativity in teams where there is an abundance of positivity is experienced as healthy conflict and challenge that is not meant to be personal.

The following are some of the rules consistent across teams and groups when it comes to positive-negative ratios: (provided by Fredrickson)

1. Human flourishing and languishing can be represented by a set of mathematical equations drawn from the Lorenz system.   
2. Flourishing is associated with dynamics that are nonrepetitive, innovative, highly flexible, and dynamically stable; that is, they represent the complex order of chaos, not the rigidity of limit cycles.
3. Human flourishing at larger scales (e.g., groups) shows a similar structure and process to human flourishing at smaller scales (e.g., individuals).
4. Appropriate negativity is a critical ingredient within human flourishing that serves to maintain a grounded system.
5. The complex dynamics of flourishing first show signs of disintegration at a positivity ratio of 11.6.
6. Human flourishing is optimal functioning characterized by four key components:

(a) goodness, indexed by happiness, satisfaction, and superior functioning;
(b) broadened thought–action repertoires and behavioral flexibility;
(c) growth, indexed by gains in enduring personal and social resources; and
(d) resilience, indexed by survival and growth in the aftermath of adversity.

Sounds complex, but really it isn’t.  Most leaders know where their team ratio is leaning.  If it’s positive, keep it that way.  If it’s not, it’s time to change it…

Editor’s Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.