202107291132 Trust is a requirement for higher-level cognitive functions
People cannot perform higher-level cognitive functions in untrusting environments because they're hardwired to think about survival first and foremost.1
These teams were successful not because they were smarter, but because they were safer.2
As social creatures, our instincts and awareness of danger extend beyond the realm of the purely physical threat. We're equally worried and concerned about social threats because they can result in the same existential threat to our survival as a physical fight. In ancestral times, the approval and support of the tribe was equivalent to survival.
This all combines to show that higher order mental processes like creativity, innovation, or imagination can only be consistently and effectively produced in a safe environment.1 Trust is the substrate of our perception of safety. Environments without trust are perceived to be (and actually are) unsafe, and therefore unsuitable for higher-order thinking and knowledge work.
A very similar but different angle on this is that 202112180933 Psychological safety is the top indicator for group performance. The difference is that in this case a minimal amount of trust and safety are required for any higher level cognitive functioning to take place. It's not obvious that this can be extended to using the amount of trust and safety to measure the level of performance. It could just as likely have been a stair-step function of whether trust exists or doesn't, not a correlation of increased performance with increased trust.