winning and losing- the psychology behind competitive team sport and business

Since when is losing the way to win team games?

Berger & Pope conducted some interesting research on 18,000 NBA basketball games. Unsuprisingly, they found that the further ahead a team was at half time-the more likely they were to win the game and vice versa for teams losing at half time. However, quite suprisingly- teams that were behind by one point at halftime were more likely to win the game than teams ahead by one point at half time. It has been suggested that this is not due to inpirational half time talks or coaches f**ing and blinding in the changing rooms, instead the sheer psychological influence of being behind another team by a whisker drives motivation.

Berger & Pope also tested this using 2 participants and asking them to compete against each other by pressing two keys on a keyboard as fast as possible. They gave the participants false performance feedback after 30 seconds - either that their score was just ahead or just behind the other participants. They then had another 30 seconds to compete in the same trial. The participants who were told their score was just behind the other particpant increased their tapping efforts significantly more than participants told there score was slightly ahead. Self-efficacy clearly has an impact in this task. Self-efficacy being how much one believes in themselves and their ability. Berger & Pope found that participants that were just behind halfway through the keyboard task and had high self efficacy (belief in self to change the outcome) were significantly more likely to win the overall task.

This has implications not only for sport but also in the workplace. In sport, i think it is near on impossible for a team to try to plan for a one point loss at half time to try to get an overall win - but coaches could provide confidence boosts for their team members increasing their self efficacy incase this eventuality does occur.
In today's society business team managers are encouraged to provide positive feedback to team members but this research suggests people should be given feedback about how they are performing in relation to a slightly better performer in order to increase their individual performance.

Information taken from The BPS Research digest.