As your managers ponder how to get often uncooperative employees to form productive teams, new research shows that it’s not their management style that’s to blame. It’s that the workers are humans. Research shows that chimps often show better teamwork!
A series of trials by scientists found that chimpanzees not only coordinate actions with each other, but they also understand the need to help a partner perform their role to achieve a common goal.
“Teamwork has been fundamental in humanity’s greatest achievements” says a press release, by scientists from the United Kingdoms’ Warwick Business School (WBS) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, but researchers “have found that working together has its evolutionary roots in our nearest primate relatives—chimpanzees.”
“We want to find out where humans’ ability to cooperate and work together has come from and whether it is unique to us, says Alicia Melis, assistant professor of Behavioral Science at the WBS. “Many animal species cooperate to achieve mutually beneficial goals like defending their territories or hunting prey. However, the level of intentional coordination underlying these group actions is often unclear, and success could be due to independent, but simultaneous actions, towards the same goal.”
The release explains the research: “The chimpanzees were put into pairs, with one needed at the back and one at the front of a sealed plastic box. Through a hole the chimpanzee at the back had to push the grapes onto a platform using a rake. The chimpanzee at the front then had to use a thick stick and push it through a hole to tilt the platform so the grapes would fall to the floor and both could pick them up to eat.”
One chimpanzee was handed both tools and had to decide which tool to pass to the partner. Ten out of 12 individuals solved the task figuring out that they had to give one of the tools to their partner, and in 73 percent of the trials, the chimpanzees chose the correct tool.
Melis explains: “There were great individual differences regarding how quickly they started transferring tools to their partner. However, after transferring a tool once, they subsequently transferred tools in 97 percent of the trials and successfully worked together to get the grapes in 86 percent of the trials.
“This study provides the first evidence that chimpanzees can pay attention to the partner’s actions in a collaborative task, and shows they know their partner not only has to be there, but perform a specific role if they are to succeed. It shows they can work strategically together just like humans do, working out that they not only need to work together but what roles each chimpanzee has to do in order to succeed.”
Let’s see—the chimps successfully worked together 86 percent of the time, “[paid] attention to the partner’s actions in a collaborative task,” and “worked strategically together.”
Yes! Chimps do exhibit better teamwork than some of your employees. And HRSBT reported that researchers recently issued findings showing that chimps are fairer to each other than humans are to each other.
And they work for peanuts—bananas!