Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 550
Rewarded apart, asked to share
Deutsch’s account of goal interdependence explains why the same team can share information or withhold it depending on whose success is rewarded
Premise
A collaboration workshop cannot make disclosure safe when an employee loses influence by helping a colleague succeed. Morton Deutsch’s Theory of Cooperation and Competition begins with the relationship between people’s goals, not with whether they like one another. That relationship changes the expected value of sharing, correcting, or withholding information.
Team dysfunction may therefore be a design problem before it is a communication problem. Executives who reward only comparative individual performance while invoking a shared mission create contradictory incentives. The first diagnostic task is to discover whose success facilitates, blocks, or barely affects another person’s goals.
What the model is: Theory of Cooperation and Competition in Knowledge →
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- Risks and limits
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainGroups & Decisions
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.