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Buying and building success: Perceptions of organizational strategies for improvement
Author(s) -
Gillath Omri,
Crandall Christian S.,
Wann Daniel L,
White Mark H
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/jasp.12755
Subject(s) - contest , perception , team effectiveness , cohesion (chemistry) , attribution , psychology , function (biology) , group cohesiveness , value (mathematics) , team composition , public relations , marketing , social psychology , business , knowledge management , computer science , chemistry , organic chemistry , neuroscience , evolutionary biology , machine learning , political science , law , biology
What makes people like a team? We suggest and test here whether people’s perceptions of teams and organizations differ as a function of the strategy the teams pick on their way to success. Two main strategies are compared: (1) Development is a strategy focused on building and enhancing the abilities of current team members; and (2) Acquisition is a strategy focused on buying talent from outside the organization. Does the way to success matter? In other words, will the strategy a team endorse affects how much people like the team? In five studies ( N = 1,672) we tested whether people prefer teams that were successful by being (a) built through long‐term development of team members or (b) bought by acquiring expensive personal developed elsewhere. Across the five studies, people preferred built teams over bought teams, including sport teams and law firms. Effort and group cohesion were more attributed to build than to bought teams. In a “mediators contest,” effort attributions proved most robust. People like built teams more than bought ones, mostly because they value the effort and hard work that built teams represent.