How the stories a team tells about itself determine what it is capable of becoming

Dan McAdams and the narrative identity applied to teams

Dan McAdams’s narrative identity research established the foundational account of how identity is constituted through story. The stories a person tells about their own life are not merely historical accounts of events that happened to them. They are the narrative identity through which the person understands who they are, what they are capable of, and what future is available to them. The person who has a story of overcoming adversity has a different identity than the person who has only a story of avoiding failure, even if their objective histories are comparable. The narrative constructs the self-concept; the self-concept determines what is attempted.

The group-level application of this mechanism is direct and well-supported. The stories a team tells about itself are the collective narrative identity through which the team understands what kind of team it is, what it has survived, and what it is therefore capable of. The team that has a story of having solved an apparently unsolvable problem has collective access to that story whenever a new apparently unsolvable problem presents itself. The story does not merely describe what happened; it provides the identity evidence that the team uses to determine whether the new challenge is the kind of challenge that teams like them can meet. The story is the self-concept, and the self-concept is the performance ceiling.

Karl Weick’s sense-making and the interpretive function of narrative

Karl Weick’s organisational sense-making research documented the foundational mechanism through which shared narratives determine how teams interpret new events. Teams do not perceive events and then interpret them; they perceive events through the interpretive frameworks that their existing narratives provide. The narrative is the lens, and the lens shapes what is seen before the conscious analysis begins. The team that has built a dominant story of technical reliability interprets the customer complaint through the technical reliability lens, which directs attention toward the communication process that delivered the product rather than the product itself. The team that has built a dominant story of customer intimacy interprets the same complaint through the customer intimacy lens, which directs attention toward the gap between what the product did and what the customer needed.

The Weick research has a specific and practically important implication: the dominant team narrative determines which signals are attended to and which are filtered out before the team’s conscious reasoning engages with them. The NASA culture research documents this at the most extreme available scale: the dominant engineering excellence narrative produced systematic downgrading of safety signals that contradicted it, because the narrative filtered those signals before the organisation’s formal decision processes could engage with them. The team narrative is not merely a cultural variable that affects morale and commitment. It is an epistemic variable that determines what information the team actually receives.

Albert Bandura’s collective self-efficacy

Albert Bandura’s extension of self-efficacy to collective contexts predicts the performance mechanism of the capability narrative. Collective self-efficacy, the shared belief in the team’s capacity to accomplish what it is attempting, predicts team performance independently of the team’s actual objective capability, through the engagement, persistence, and ambition that the collective belief produces. The team that genuinely believes it can solve the problem engages with the problem differently from the team that is uncertain whether it is capable of solving it, and the engagement difference produces outcome differences that the belief itself then confirms. Collective self-efficacy is both a predictor of performance and a self-fulfilling mechanism.

The most important implication of the Bandura finding for team narrative is the account of where collective self-efficacy comes from. The primary source is mastery experience: the team’s direct history of having accomplished comparable things. The story of previous accomplishment is the primary input to the collective self-efficacy that future attempts require. The team that has a clear, widely shared, and repeatedly told story of what it has previously achieved has the collective self-efficacy that the story of previous achievement provides. The team that has not told that story, whose previous achievements are present in individual memories but absent from the shared narrative, has not accumulated the collective self-efficacy that the story would generate.

Viktor Frankl and the adversity narrative

Viktor Frankl’s meaning research predicts the specific function of the team narrative in conditions of adversity. The team that has a story that makes sense of its difficult periods, that integrates the commercial failure, the product that did not work, the team member who left abruptly, into a coherent narrative of development and purpose, is more resilient to subsequent adversity than the team whose difficult periods are unintegrated, present in individual experience but absent from the collective story, or present in a narrative of victimhood or misfortune that provides no developmental meaning.

The adversity narrative is not the optimistic reframe that toxic positivity provides: it is not the claim that the failure was not really a failure or that the difficulty was secretly a gift. It is the genuine narrative integration that acknowledges the difficulty while locating it within a story of the team’s development. The commercial failure that taught the team something specific about its market, the team member departure that revealed something important about the culture, the product that did not work and forced the team to understand the problem more precisely: these are the adversity narratives that build the resilience that Frankl’s meaning mechanism predicts, because they are the stories that make the difficulty coherent rather than merely painful.

Carol Dweck and the performance ceiling narrative

Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research predicts the specific mechanism through which the team narrative sets the team’s performance ceiling. The team that tells a story about what it is, “we are the technical team,” “we are the scrappy startup that moves fast,” “we are the company that does X better than anyone,” has installed an entity narrative that makes departures from the identity feel like violations of the team’s self-concept. The entity narrative is self-limiting not because it is inaccurate but because it defines the team’s capabilities as fixed rather than as the current output of a developing capacity.

The team that tells a story about how it develops, “we figured out the logistics problem, so we can figure out the compliance problem,” “we have learned to do things we did not know how to do before,” has installed a growth narrative that makes ambitious attempts feel continuous with the team’s story rather than contradictory to it. The growth narrative’s performance ceiling is the current attempt, not the current capability, because the narrative frames the team’s capability as expanding rather than as defined. The founder who wants to know why the team is not attempting things that seem within reach should examine the dominant story the team tells about what it is, because that story is the primary determinant of what the team believes it is eligible to attempt.

The founding story as identity foundation

Daniel Coyle’s culture research documented the specific narrative function of the founding story that the research on collective narrative identity predicts. The story of how the team started, the problem it was created to solve, the conditions it was founded under, and the values that drove its creation, functions as the identity foundation that subsequent team members orient toward when they join. The founding story is the primary narrative that answers the question every new team member brings: what kind of team is this, and what does belonging to it mean?

The practical implication is that the founding story is a culture management tool that the founder either actively uses or passively allows to form from whatever the team’s informal narrative produces. The team that has never been explicitly told the founding story in a way that connects its origins to its current purpose and future direction will construct a founding story from the available evidence, and the available evidence is the founder’s behaviour, the decisions that have been made, and the priorities that have been revealed through resource allocation. The story the team constructs from that evidence is the founding story the culture will carry forward.

If the experiences described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: McAdams, D.P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100-122. Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W.H. Freeman. Frankl, V.E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. Coyle, D. (2018). The Culture Code. Bantam Books. Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House. Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick. Random House.