Intuitively Game theory tends to be tangible with a broad level understanding of each Individual in a game playing for their own selves serve to contribute to the group.
Now lets try and apply this rule to a real team with members and competing with others, is where this theory becomes most interesting. Each member if play for their own selves would be said to lack team spirit and team work weakening the teams chances. So is this not workable?
It is!! Actually a paradox in itself, since best leadership principles claim to build a similar team, where in the Team leader
is given the strategic task of creating a synergy by which although each member works for himself but the entire team is benefitted in the process. This resonates a lot with the different motivational theories and different models of an organization or teams.As is the case with the classical Prisoner’s Paradox, it demonstrates the synergistic cooperation between the two prisoners, highlighting the paramount importance of trust in any team and leadership vision. High trust can breed an exceptional team built upon empowerment of each team member allowing them to combine in ways to attain excellence at levels that become benchmark in the given arena.
Another lesson that we learn is the empowerment of each team member to make a choice, this over time allows the team to thrive by letting each individual member
be conscious of own as well as others contributions as well as aware of the continuous commitment by all to stay with the team. This is also a paradox, because we assume the absence of any interactions arising between two members and the impacts of the same.The Game Theory model is over simplistic, in which like a linear equation we only consider each team member in the overall team equation. However we do not take into account the interaction between smaller member groups within the team, hence the validity of this model suffers a drawback in cases where in these smaller groups within the team are stronger than the overall team.
Another point of contention to Game Theory is team expansion, due to the inclusion of new team members the internal team interactions become very dynamic making the Game Theory virtues of Trust and Empowerment fade in the continuous evolution of the team through its phases of Form, Storm, Norm and Perform.
We need further insights into team working and team dilemma to one day be able to converge this idealistic model with practice and get to a best practice which can support leadership visions.
Let me know if you have seen this in Teams.
