From flying a plane to swinging on a trapeze, there are plenty of high performance jobs where people must work closely together without making mistakes. Research into psychology and organizations has mostly concluded that the presence of positive emotions among team members generally improves performance across a range of occupations.

But happiness and excitement may be overrated, at least where performance is concerned, suggests new research from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Using pairs of cancer surgeons as their focus, researchers found that only tension and the lack of it had a significant impact on how well people worked together. And the way to achieve that more chilled-out feeling was for two surgeons to experience at least one previous surgery together where things went very well.

“It’s not so much that creating positivity makes us flow. It’s more removing obstacles to flow that matters,” said Tiziana Casciaro, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management and the Marcel Desautels Chair in Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School. She is one of four study co-authors of the research into joint task performance.