Defensive behaviours in innovation teams: how project teams discuss defensiveness and its relationship with innovation resilience behaviour and project success
article
Project team members and project leaders of innovation projects were interviewed about the possible presence of defensive behaviours within the team. While investigating defensive behaviour can be done validly by observation techniques, to talk about defensiveness within a team often leads to socially desirable and therefore biased information. However, applying discourse analysis reveals how intentions to discuss defensiveness in itself leads to defensive behaviour. The study demonstrates how individuals use pauses, apply humour, make external attributions and devaluate the importance of defensiveness. This suggests that even metadiscussing defensiveness is quite hard. The study also found indications that defensiveness is associated with lower team innovation resilience behaviour and reported project success. Resting on the assumption that defensiveness may lead to risk avoidance, the study argues that defensive behaviours in teams working on innovation projects might be detrimental to the innovation goals. This implies the need to develop socially safe team climates that encourage open and ongoing dialogue on defensiveness in order to avoid defensive behaviours.
TNO Identifier
575977
Source
Language, Discourse and Society, 4(2), pp. 13-36.
Pages
13-36