“What if performance isn’t just about talent or tactics—but how much your teammates trust you, enjoy working with you, or feel nervous around you?”
If you’re reading this article, I’m guessing you’re interested in team leadership and helping your team reach their potential.
Imagine your team has a reputation in your organisation for being a high-performance team. Maybe they already hold this reputation. But deep down, you know something is off.
You can’t always put your finger on it, but the best way to describe it might be that your team is not firing as well as you know they can—there are gaps in quality where there shouldn’t be, and gaps in knowledge where you’re confident the team know their discipline.
What if how they feel about each other is impacting their performance?
Some new research from Japan has examined this phenomenon—and the results are fascinating.
A research team from Musashino University studied American football and basketball teams using a custom-built web system designed to track how team members perceived each other in real time.
Over the course of the study, the researchers gathered data from approximately 115 players—90 in American football and 25 in basketball—capturing both self-assessed traits and impressions teammates held of one another across multiple games.
They recorded impressions of trust, tension, familiarity, enjoyment, fear, and perceived smartness—both before and during play.
This was their key finding:
Teams performed measurably better when positive impressions were high and negative ones, such as fear or nervousness, were low.
This wasn’t just theoretical. In football, teams that felt more familiar and trusting toward each other were better at stopping their opponents. In basketball, performance dipped when negative impressions increased, even if tactics remained the same.
In other words, just because you have all the methods, systems, and tactics in place to run a high-performing team doesn’t mean it will happen. How people feel about their teammates—and about being within the team—is just as valid as the processes and tools they use to do the work.
We tend to think of emotions as a byproduct of performance—but this study suggests they’re part of the engine.
Positive impressions among teammates reduce friction and amplify cohesion. The research found that when correlations between positive impressions—like familiarity, trust, fun, and smartness—increased, team performance improved. At the same time, a decrease in negative impressions—like nervousness and fear—was consistently associated with better outcomes on the field or court.
What’s more, these impressions are contagious and self-reinforcing. As familiarity and trust increase, fear and tension decrease—creating a virtuous cycle of clarity and cooperation.
In other words: team dynamics are emotional dynamics. And they matter more than we’ve assumed.
This isn’t just about sport. It applies to any highly collaborative environment, such as cross-functional project teams, executive groups, or multidisciplinary teams in law, health, consulting, and the creative industries.
When teams are under pressure, it’s not just capability that drives performance—it’s relational clarity. The ability to read each other, trust each other, and feel respected should no longer be seen as a “soft” skill—it’s structural, and it’s important. In fact, the study’s authors emphasize that these insights extend well beyond athletics: any context where teamwork drives outcomes can benefit from tracking and improving mutual impressions. They also found that when impressions were factored into team composition—rather than just technical skill—performance improved in dynamic, high-stakes scenarios.
What if your team composition, onboarding, or project kick-offs included time for building impressions that matter?
Performance isn’t just what people do—it’s what they see in each other.
This research opens up new ways to think about team building. It challenges us to stop relying solely on skills matrices and instead tune into the emotional architecture of our teams.
So next time you sense something is “off,” ask yourself: what are the impressions beneath the surface?