Ah! Sounds interesting and useful but behind a paywall :(
> our interviews with executives, reveals that purpose is only one contributing factor; the level and quality of interpersonal collaboration actually has the greatest impact on employee engagement.2 In this article, we’ll explore why collaboration has that effect and which behaviors you can adopt and practic
Some excerpts:
> ... Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
> ... Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
> Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.
It wasn't the quality of the members, it was if there was just one "bad" member, or not. One bad member could sink a team no matter how good everyone else was.
They did find a sort of magic outlier where if the team member had an outstanding leader they could overcome the one bad member. However they believed that those folks were so rare and you're unlikely to find them that it's not something a team can strive to have.
Their measurements as for "bad" was largely based on their observations of teams meetings. Factors like simply being negative, insults (or close to insults, what we probabbly call toxicity today), disruptive, disrespectful, not being prepared (I found this one interesting as NOBODY seems prepared for a meeting anymore), and things like simply trying to change direction on any plans that were agreed to repeatedly.
> our research using organizational network analysis (ONA) and our interviews with executives
But, it's only an advertisement for Workday disguised as an article.