Why Culture Drives Team Success in Football

Why culture is so important for team success - lessons from football

Culture is used an an all-encompassing term, and defined in many ways. Some say it is what goes unspoken and yet is accepted that defines culture.

Charlotte Schaller discusses the importance of culture for team success in her LinkedIn post. 

At SNA Toolbox, we utilise innovative Social Network Analytic methods to detect culture. Foremost here is recognising the fact that culture is not driven by the average attitude of team members, but instead that culture is usally driven by the infleuntial players in the team. Those with the ‘loudest voices’ - that is, those connected and respected by many people in the team - have their opinions weighted more highly than someone with few connections and less respect. 

What this means is, if we want to better understand culture, we need to know who these socially prominent people are and their attiudes, beliefs and behaviours because they are more likely to represent a team culture - to represent ‘this is how we do things around here’. 

Look at these figures below comparing the insights of the average versus the proinent in terms of what it says about culture.

Figure 1 (above) shows us the theoretical difference in approach between standard surveys (i.e., collate all responses, and use the average score to represent the view of the players) versus a Social Network approach to culture (i.e., where some people are more prominent within the team, and their views are weighted more heaviliy because of this influence over others).

Figure 2 (above) shows a comparison of 4 Australian Football League (AFL) clubs using standard survey responses and standard statistical analysis. on average attitudes Using this approach, we find that there are NO significant differences between clubs on a range of variables. If we left left our analysis here, we would conclude that the culture of each club is the same.

Finally, Figure 3 (above) shows us that with an SNA approach that the prominent players in each of these 4 teams hold different attitudes We know that socially prominent people are advantaged and have the ‘loudest voices’ or are more easily able to ‘hold court’ - the result of which is that their views are given more weight. Using SNA we show that the cultures of these 4 AFL teams are likely to be very different.

In conclusion, a Social Network approach is able to give unique insights into team culture, about ‘acceptable ways of behaving’ that weight the opinions of the more connected (more central) people in the team's network of connections. As the attitudes of the influential people in the 4 clubs differ, so do the cultures. 

So what? In terms of trying to intervene in such cultures, it suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work across all clubs, and that each club has its own particular way of doing things and so each club needs a customised approach to changing its culture.