Why You Should Keep Your Team Small
Imagine two different sized teams: One with four people, one with eight. Together, each team’s members are pulling a rope to test their combined strength. Question: How much stronger was the eight men team, compared with the team consisting of 4? Mathematics tells us that the team of eight people should pull two times stronger than the four men team. But what if I told you that this is not true? Would you believe that the eight men team was not pulling stronger than the small team, which had half as many people?
Before you call this nonsense and stop reading at this point, let me tell you about Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, who discovered the phenomenon I just described, in 1913. Ringelmann measured the strength of people pulling a rope alone and in groups of different size. The result: The individual effort of each person decreased when pulling the rope together with others. None of them was working as hard as when they pulled the rope alone. People actually put in less strength the more people were on their team, which lead to the point where a team of 8 people didn’t pull stronger than a team of 4.
This phenomenon is called the Ringelmann effect, after the man who discovered it, but it’s also known under the more common term “social loafing.” People tend to reduce their efforts when working in a team, depending on the number of team mates.
Social loafing is usually not practiced intentionally. The decrease in productivity due to a higher number of team mates happens subconsciously – most people don’t laze on purpose. Nevertheless, it can happen to everyone, no matter how diligent and capable you are. On one project, you might be the enthusiastic leader who carries the team single-handedly, and on the next, you’re the guy whose attention is equally shared between his phone and the coffee cup. Social loafing often happens unseen: The group appears to be productive, but really each member is far from working to his full potential and doesn’t even notice it. The results might be still good, but they’re not as good as they could be.
There are several conditions that encourage social loafing:
- The individual impact of each team member is not clear, which makes it easy to reduce one’s own efforts without getting caught.
- Perceiving the own influence on the group’s output as little. One might think his work input won’t make a big difference.
- Not identifying yourself with the group you’re in.
- The feeling that nobody is watching, which makes it easy to get away with laziness.
- Having a productive group that seems to do well even without your efforts.
Social loafing is not the same as free riding. “Free rider” is a term used for people who keep down their own input when working in groups and instead have their teams put in the effort. They tend not to participate, focus more on their phones than on the meeting, and be the last one to arrive and the first one to leave. Free riding is practiced intentionally: It happens based on the thinking “My team will carry me.” Free riders are liabilities to their groups due to being both unproductive and extremely passive. Don’t expect any creative input from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome of the project (or assignment).
How to minimize social loafing
When determining the number of team mates, you should keep both the free riders and the social loafing in mind: The bigger the group, the harder it is to identify each member’s work. That makes the life of free riders easy, who will minimize their own effort and let the harder working individuals carry the team. To avoid this, you have first to identify free riding team members and then make it difficult for them to be lazy. An efficient way of doing that is setting up clear and measurable tasks for each group member. Within a student team, this could be the task of writing a 1000 words analysis for the group assignment, within the next seven days. If every group member has to deliver an individual, measurable part, lazing around becomes much harder to get away with.
Diminishing social loafing is trickier because it’s unlikely you can completely avoid it, no matter how motivated, disciplined and diligent your team mates are. With every person, you add to the team the individual effort will decrease. That doesn’t mean that group works are generally evil. Many tasks and projects cannot be done by one alone and require different opinions, skills, and experiences. But you should keep in mind that the size of a group will affect the output of each teammate.
I don’t believe one member more or less can potentially ruin your team’s performance. By my experience, having a freerider in the group can be much more detrimental, as he is not only a burden but also has a negative effect on the team harmony. However, when it comes to teams of 7 and more people I would recommend dividing them into smaller subgroups because large groups have in my opinion various other disadvantages:
• The more people are on the team, the harder it gets to find a compromise.
• Depending on the assignment, dividing the workload fairly and equally among all members can get difficult.
• Large teams run the risk of breaking up into smaller groups rather than working as a unit.
From what I have seen during my Bachelor and Master studies, teams of 4 to 5 people seem like a good composition. I can’t think of one example where a team of 6 was getting significantly more work done than the groups with fewer people (In fact, one of the most successful teams I remember consisted of only two persons). The right group size also depends on the work: I would prefer moving my furniture into a new flat with the help of 10 friends rather than 5. In that example, having a large team is an undeniable advantage. But many tasks, like presentations, papers, and analyses, for instance, don’t necessarily benefit from a larger team. Therefore, I think that social loafing is a phenomenon whose impact shouldn’t be underestimated and taken into consideration when setting up or joining a team. But when choosing between teams of either 4, 5 or 6 people, don’t forget to take one of the most important factors into account: Your personal preference.
