Smaller Teams Are Better

05/16/2016

If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.
Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), French philosopher

In "Why Less Is More in Teams," in Harvard Business Review (August 6, 2012), Mark de Rond introduces the concept of social loafing — when team members reduce their effort because they feel less responsible for the output.

"Social loafing, one of the most documented phenomena in social psychology, has been demonstrated on all kinds of teams, including those that rely on people with different skill sets working in a coordinated fashion.... [In over 80 studies of social loafing] people tend to prefer teams of four or, at most, five members. Anything fewer than four was felt to be too small to be effective, whereas teams larger than five became ineffective...

"[These studies] remind us... that smaller teams are generally better and, all things being equal, that teams are most likely to optimize their performance when they have slightly fewer members than the task at hand requires."

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