High Performing Teams Frameworks: 6 Models Reviewed

You've probably come across these frameworks before — Hackman's 6 Conditions, Lencioni's pyramid, Google's Project Aristotle. They show up in leadership courses, team offsites, and LinkedIn posts with surprising regularity.

But here's a question worth asking: which ones are actually backed by evidence? And which are just... popular?

That distinction matters more than you might think. One of the most widely-used team frameworks in corporate Australia has no peer-reviewed validation at all. (We'll get to that.)

This guide breaks down six frameworks — what each one says, how strong the research is, and when to actually use it. For each, we'll share what the evidence says, what leaders experience when they try to apply it, and where most get stuck.

(You might wonder about Tuckman's Stages — forming, storming, norming, performing. It's not included because it describes what teams go through but doesn't predict effectiveness or guide intervention. It's descriptive, not prescriptive.)

1. Hackman's 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness

If you've ever looked at a struggling team and thought, "These are good people — why isn't this working?" — Hackman's research might explain why.

J. Richard Hackman spent decades at Harvard studying what makes teams work. His finding? Six conditions account for up to 80% of variance in team performance. That's an extraordinary number. Get these six things right, and you've addressed most of what determines whether a team succeeds or fails.

Essential conditions (without these, teams rarely succeed):

• Real team — stable membership with clear boundaries. Not a team in name only.
• Compelling direction — a clear, challenging purpose that energises and aligns.
• Enabling structure — the right people, sound task design, core norms of conduct.

Enabling conditions (which allow successful teams to excel):

• Supportive context — rewards that recognise team performance, access to information and resources.
• Expert coaching — available when needed, focused on improving team processes.
• Adequate resources — material, financial, and human resources required to execute.

What this means for you

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most of what determines team effectiveness isn't within your control. Reward systems, reporting structures, resource allocation — these are organisational decisions. You can build trust and improve communication, but you often can't redesign the incentive structure that's working against you.

This is where leaders get frustrated. They read about Hackman's conditions and think, "I can't change any of this." And sometimes that's true.

But knowing the real problem — even when you can't fix it immediately — is better than blaming your team for what's actually a structural failure.

That's a "real team" problem — one of Hackman's essential conditions. Without genuine interdependence, you have a collection of individuals, not a team. And no amount of trust-building exercises will change that.

Try this today

Think about a team you lead or belong to. Which of Hackman's six conditions is weakest? If it's an essential condition (real team, compelling direction, enabling structure), that's likely where your biggest leverage is — even if it's the hardest to change.

2. Google's Project Aristotle

Google's People Analytics team spent two years studying 180 of their own teams. They analysed over 250 attributes and conducted 200+ interviews. The researchers expected team composition — the calibre of individual performers — to matter most.

They were wrong.

Project Aristotle identified five dynamics that predict team effectiveness, in order of importance:

1. Psychological safety — team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable
2. Dependability — members reliably complete quality work on time
3. Structure and clarity — clear goals, roles, and execution plans
4. Meaning — work is personally important to team members
5. Impact — the team believes their work matters

The surprise wasn't just that psychological safety topped the list. Individual attributes — intelligence, personality type, seniority, even technical expertise — had far less predictive power than these team-level dynamics. Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact.

What this means for you

Here's something worth sitting with: most leaders think they're approachable. Most teams would disagree.

The gap exists because you judge yourself by your intentions ("I want people to speak up") while your team judges you by your reactions. One dismissive response to a question. One sigh when someone raises a concern. One "let's take that offline" that never gets followed up.

These small moments — often invisible to you — accumulate into silence.

That difference — between pretending and admitting — is psychological safety in action. It's not about being nice. It's about being able to take interpersonal risks without fear.

The leaders who build psychological safety aren't the ones who announce it. They're the ones who respond well when someone actually takes a risk. They say "I don't know" first. They thank people for raising problems instead of shooting the messenger. It's not a policy. It's a pattern of behaviour, repeated hundreds of times.

Try this today

In your next meeting, notice how you respond when someone raises a concern or admits they don't know something. Do you move on quickly? Do you thank them? Your reaction in that moment shapes whether others will take the same risk.

3. Edmondson's Psychological Safety Research

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety has been cited over 18,921 times — making it one of the most influential findings in organisational psychology.

Her 1999 study introduced the construct of team psychological safety: "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking."

The most counterintuitive finding came from hospital medical teams: high-performing teams reported MORE errors than low-performing teams. Better teams weren't making more mistakes — they were more willing to discuss them openly, creating learning opportunities that lower-performing teams suppressed.

What this means for you

Here's the paradox: the leaders who most need to build psychological safety are often the least aware it's missing. If you're senior, confident, and quick to respond, people may have learned to stay quiet around you — and you may never know.

That's what happens without psychological safety. Errors get buried. Problems get hidden until they're too big to ignore. The team looks functional on the surface while learning nothing underneath.

Try this today

Share a mistake you made recently, and what you learned from it. Do it first, before expecting others to. Building safety requires vulnerability from the leader first — you have to model it before others will follow.

4. Woolley's Collective Intelligence Research

Here's something that might challenge how you build teams: assembling the smartest individuals doesn't reliably produce the smartest team.

Anita Williams Woolley's research at Carnegie Mellon, published in Science in 2010, identified a "c factor" for collective intelligence — analogous to the "g factor" for individual intelligence. This single factor explains over 40% of variance in group performance across diverse tasks.

The surprising finding: collective intelligence is NOT strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members. Having the smartest people doesn't mean you have the smartest team.

What DOES predict collective intelligence:

• Social sensitivity — teams whose members score higher on reading emotions and understanding others
• Equal turn-taking — teams where conversation isn't dominated by a few members
• Proportion of women — mediated by social sensitivity (women on average score higher on social perceptiveness)

What this means for you

The "why" usually comes down to dynamics. In this case, two senior people dominated every conversation. Others deferred to them — or disengaged entirely. The collective intelligence of the group was limited to what two people could see.

Most hiring processes optimise for individual capability. Most meeting cultures reward the people who speak most confidently. Most promotion decisions favour technical expertise over collaborative skill. Everything about how organisations work pushes against what Woolley's research shows actually matters.

Try this today

In your next meeting, track who speaks most — and create space for those who don't. Ask quieter members directly for their view. The person who asks good questions is as valuable as the person who gives confident answers.

5. Mathieu's Shared Mental Models

You know that feeling when a team just "clicks"? When you start a sentence and someone finishes it? When coordination feels effortless? That's not magic — it's shared mental models.

John Mathieu's research demonstrates that when team members share understanding of the task and each other, they can anticipate needs and adapt rapidly — without constant explicit communication.

The critical finding: having shared mental models doesn't directly improve performance — it improves how teams coordinate their actions, which in turn improves performance. The mechanism matters.

What this means for you

That "clicking" doesn't happen by accident. It's built through repeated interaction, explicit conversation about roles, and deliberate attention to how work flows between people.

Building shared mental models takes time — time that teams under pressure rarely feel they have. So they skip the "slow" work of clarifying roles, mapping processes, and discussing who knows what. Then they pay for it later in miscommunication, rework, and frustration.

Try this today

With a new team member or project, invest the time upfront to clarify roles and working preferences. Documents transfer information. Shared mental models require interaction — watching how people work, asking questions, building intuition about each other. There's no shortcut.

6. Lencioni's 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

Now for the awkward one.

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is one of the most popular business books on teamwork. It's sold over 3 million copies, been translated into 30+ languages, and is widely used in corporate training across Australia.

But here's what most people don't know: the model has no peer-reviewed empirical validation.

The pyramid proposes five dysfunctions in hierarchical order:

1. Absence of Trust (foundation) — unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
2. Fear of Conflict — seeking artificial harmony over constructive debate
3. Lack of Commitment — feigning buy-in creates ambiguity
4. Avoidance of Accountability — ducking responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behaviour
5. Inattention to Results (top) — focusing on personal success over team success

To be clear: the individual constructs (trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results) are supported by independent research. What lacks validation is Lencioni's specific hierarchical structure and causal claims. There's no peer-reviewed evidence that trust must come first, or that the pyramid sequence is accurate.

For trust specifically, De Jong's meta-analysis of 112 studies and 7,763 teams found a consistent positive relationship (ρ = .30) with team performance. McKinsey's research found teams above average on trust are 3.3× more efficient and 5.1× more likely to produce results.

What this means for you

Despite the evidence gap, Lencioni's model resonates. Leaders recognise the dysfunctions in their own teams. The pyramid gives them language to describe what they're seeing — and that's genuinely useful.

That's the tension with Lencioni: it's helpful as a lens, but misleading as a map. Real teams don't move neatly from trust to conflict to commitment. Sometimes accountability comes first — because external pressure forces it — and trust develops later.

The bigger problem: Lencioni treats team dysfunction as an internal issue — as if the five dysfunctions exist inside the team and can be fixed by the team. Hackman's research shows this is often wrong. Many team problems are actually structural — reward systems, reporting lines, resource constraints — and no amount of trust-building will fix a broken design.

How to use it appropriately

Use Lencioni to start conversations, not to diagnose problems. If your team recognises itself in the five dysfunctions, that's useful — it creates shared language. But don't assume the pyramid sequence is correct, and don't ignore the possibility that your team's problems are structural rather than interpersonal. Sometimes the dysfunction is in the system, not the people.

The Limitation of Frameworks

If you've read this far, you probably already knew most of this.

The characteristics of high performing teams aren't secret. Trust matters. Psychological safety is important. Communication and accountability play a role. You've seen the research. You've heard the concepts.

Frameworks tell you WHAT high performing teams look like. None of them tells you HOW to build one.

That's not a criticism — it's just what frameworks do. They give you a map, not the territory. Knowing Hackman's six conditions doesn't create them. Understanding psychological safety doesn't make your team feel safe. Reading about shared mental models doesn't build them.

What's hard is the daily work of building them: responding well when someone challenges you, admitting when you're wrong, following through on small commitments, creating space for others to speak.

That work doesn't happen in a workshop. It happens in moments — thousands of them — over months and years. Frameworks can point you in the right direction. But they can't do the walking for you.

What to do next

Pick one thing from this guide — just one — and try it this week:

• From Hackman: Identify which of the six conditions is weakest in your team
• From Project Aristotle: Notice how you respond when someone admits they don't know something
• From Edmondson: Share a mistake you made, and what you learned from it
• From Woolley: In your next meeting, track who speaks most — and create space for those who don't

Small actions, repeated over time. That's how high performing teams are actually built.

Learn more about what makes a high performing team →

Explore our full high performing teams resource hub →