Any football, hockey, rugby, or team player will tell you that there is such a thing as team confidence. There’s even a simple, scientifically-validated way of assessing collective confidence with this question (1):
Rate your team’s confidence in their ability to perform to a high level, in order to achieve success in their next competitive performance.
0 (Not all confident) …………………………………… 100 (Completely Confident)
You can measure the collective confidence of a team by taking the average of the individual members’ scores on this simple scale. And research shows that collective confidence plays out for groups much the way that personal self-belief works with individuals. Athletes who have more confidence in their teams set more challenging goals for themselves, put in more effort, show greater physical endurance, show more resilience to setbacks and adversities and persist more despite failure.
And because of this, teams with this collective confidence achieve better results in competitions, as any sports fan will acknowledge, and as a review by Roehampton University researchers showed in 2016 (2). Sports fans will also tell you that team managers or coaches are crucial to building a team’s confidence and, therefore, their success: the science backs them up.
Leaders can transmit their level of confidence to the team’s collective can-do spirit, even if they are just temporary bosses in newly formed teams. For example, in a 2015 study from the University of Leuven, 100 Belgian basketball players took part in a net shooting competition, after being randomly allocated to several small teams (3).
Each team had appointed a leader who was not only a basketball player of a similar skill level but also a confederate of the researchers. Half the leaders adopted a high-team-confidence approach, expressing confidence in the team’s ability, reacting enthusiastically when the team scored, and showing confident body language. The other leaders were scripted to respond with annoyance when the team missed a score, make critical comments, and show a discouraged, unconfident body posture.
The confidently-led teams became more sure of their team’s ability and developed a stronger sense of us, i.e., a collective team identity to match the collective team confidence. As they began the shooting match, the two sets of teams had similar levels of shooting accuracy. But by the end, those with leaders expressing high collective confidence were netting 30% more of their shots than the others.
And you can see collective confidence at work in the individual brain, a 2015 Oxford University study discovered (4). When people are working collaboratively together in a group, their brains track their performance as well as that of others in the group. This happens in a part of the brain called Brodmann’s area 9, at the front of the brain.
When people work together, their brains merge their self-tracking with tracking the other’s performance. It is as if their brains are keeping a tally of group performance and so building a neural signal of collective confidence.
What happens when people compete with each other rather than collaborating in a team? – The Oxford researchers showed that the opposite pattern happens in the brain. Activity for the self and the other person diverged completely. This makes sense because the last thing you want in a competition is for your brain to confuse your performance with that of a rival.
Trust is the binding glue for collective confidence – trust in the leader and trust in the group. The hormone oxytocin is released when we feel bonded to other people and its mood-lifting, anxiety-reducing and motivating effects very likely play a big role in collective confidence (5).
1. Bruton AM, Mellalieu SD, Shearer DA. Validation of a single-item stem for collective efficacy measurement in sports teams. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. 2016;14(4):383-401.
2. Bruton AM, Mellalieu SD, Shearer DA. Observation as a method to enhance collective efficacy: An integrative review. Psychology of Sport and Exercise. 2016;24:1-8.
3. Fransen K, Haslam SA, Steffens NK, Vanbeselaere N, De Cuyper B, Boen F. Believing in “us”: Exploring leaders’ capacity to enhance team confidence and performance by building a sense of shared social identity. Journal of experimental psychology: applied. 2015;21(1):89.
4. Wittmann MK, Kolling N, Faber NS, Scholl J, Nelissen N, Rushworth MFS. Self-Other Mergence in the Frontal Cortex during Cooperation and Competition. Neuron. 2016;91(2):482-93.
5. Gur R, Tendler A, Wagner S. Long-term social recognition memory is mediated by oxytocin-dependent synaptic plasticity in the medial amygdala. Biological psychiatry. 2014;76(5):377-86.
