What is the optimal team size?

 

(US) Wharton Business School (for it Time Weekly)

In the sports field, the number of players in each sports team is clear: a basketball team needs five people, 9 baseball teams, and 11 football teams. However, in the workplace, as the number of teams in an ever-expanding and complex organization becomes more and more common, it is not a rule to determine the optimal number of people for each team.

According to a recent article "How to Build a superior team" published in Fortune magazine ~ 6. What if each team has 5 to 6 members? This is the number of MBA students that Wharton School chooses for its 144 Independent Learning teams every year.

"As early as the beginning of social psychology, someone raised the issue of team size," says Jennifer S. Miller, a professor of management at the Wharton Business School ." She recalled the French agricultural engineer, Mark simiilian linguman, who was born in 1861. In his early studies, he found that the more people pull the rope, the less per capita effort. Do large teams often collapse due to their "social inertia" and lack of collaboration?

Everyone is important

Although one of Miller's key research areas is team size, she and other management scientists at the Wharton Business School both believe that scale is not necessarily the first thing to consider when setting up an effective team.

"First, it is important to know what tasks the team will undertake. A response to this question will reveal what kind of employees you want to hire and what types of skills you want, one of which is the degree of coordination you need. For a sales team, real coordination can only be achieved at the end. Because it is the behavior of a single individual, there is no mutual dependency between people. Mutual dependency is very important. It is one of the criteria for measuring whether interpersonal relationships are harmonious ."

"Second, how will the Team be structured? What skills do people need to use in their actions? This includes working style, personal style, knowledge base, and so on. Make sure that all these are suitable for tasks ."

"Third, you need to consider the team size ." Catherine J. Klein, a professor of management at Wharton Business School, wrote in a paper titled team mental model and team performance, because the team's best-scale research seems to have attracted many companies and academic institutions to participate, "over the past 10 years, as teams have become increasingly popular in various types of organizations, research on team efficiency has sprung up."

Klein admitted in an interview that everyone is important to the team. "If you are two Members, is that a team or a dual peer? If you have three people, you will suddenly have the opportunity to fight for power, such as two-to-one. Some people think that the three teams are very different from the two teams, while others think that the even and odd teams are also different. Intuition tells me that when your team is more than 8 or 9 people, you will find it bloated, troublesome, and factional. Happy? Worried? These are determined by the tasks of the Organization. People feel that when the Team expands, it will show 'social inertia, 'and some people start to pass through, as a monk hits for a day ."

The famous "rope pulling" experiment, often referred to as the "Lin Gelman effect", analyzes the individual's performance in the rope pulling process. When he moved more and more people to join the rope, he found that although the overall pull increased, the average pull exerted by each member reduced, which is contrary to the traditional theory that the team members work harder. He attributed it to the so-called "social inertia", that is, a group or team often "hides" the lack of personal efforts.

"After the number of people is greater than five, the pull of people in the team degrades. However, unless there is a lack of motivation or mandatory tasks, people will not be willing to reveal 'social inertia '. If you ask managers this question, they will say, 'You are worrying about laziness and hitchhiking. 'Laziness (social inertia) refers to the reduction of personal efforts in the context of a group, while free-riding is a rational selfish act. If a person doesn't get any encouragement, he will say, 'I want to get a hitchhiking', that is, he will not participate actively ."

Magic Number 6

The team size is "not necessarily a matter of immediate consideration, but it is really important", says Ivan ventenberger, director of the Wharton School's Leadership research project ". Although there is no clear conclusion on the best team scale research, it should be in the 5 ~ Between 12 people, some people say 5 ~ 9 people are the most appropriate, and I agree that 6 people are the best team ."

Vitenberger added that a superior team not only depends on the optimum size. For example, Wharton assigned 5 ~ 6 MBA students. "We are not just assigning those people. We must confirm that they can all work effectively. We took all 800 students to camp in the forest in northern New York to start the study team retreat program. We spent two days building a team and building mutual trust. I think this is something people often forget to do when building a team in an enterprise-they spend some time building a collaborative work system. We began to get to know each other and share our core personal values. In this way, we formed team values. But more importantly, we lead students towards the collective goal and follow the team principles and principles. The most fundamental question is what we will do and how we will do it ?"

Vitenberger said that in the workplace, people have always stressed that ~ 6 people are the most appropriate (within a team ). At least for us, it allows everyone to make full use of their talents. But frankly speaking, I think it depends on the specific task.

Miller's recent research seems to have also confirmed the view of vitenberger that the preparations for the success of the team are crucial. Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed that changes in the size of the team can affect the workflow and final performance of the Working Group. Miller studied 238 people from 26 teams, ranging from 3 to 20. Her findings validate the conclusion that the larger the team, the poorer the member's performance, but she also explained: "Because some research shows that managers often make the team redundant, therefore, understanding the reason why the larger the team is, the worse the individual performance, may become the key to implementing a successful management strategy. In addition, the lack of individual performance is not so much related to collaborative behavior, it is better to establish a good friendship with each other to improve individual performance ."

But does the best team scale exist? Miller once again concluded that it depends on the task. "If you want a group of people who clean the stadium, there is no limit; 30 people clean faster than 5 people ." However, if the company is dealing with coordination tasks and incentives, Miller believes that the answer is 6 people. She said: "in an organization with five or more people, the motivation for work gradually fades away. After 5th people, you start looking for your own small circle. How many people express their opinions at the same time? It is more difficult to manage five or more people in an organization ."

 

Diversity: not conducive to unity?

Klein's latest research explores another vague area of team issues-the value of diversity. Many theories have pointed out that the differences in gender, race, and age lead to conflicts and extremely low levels of social integration, while many other studies have reversed. Klein said: "The general idea is that people share a group of people and people like themselves. Therefore, there is a theory that diversity is not conducive to unity. However, there is also a theory that diversification is advantageous because it inspires more ideas, perspectives, and innovations, so as to produce better solutions ."

Both Klein and linguman have discovered the unique value of commonality between team members. The authors described how the team's mental model enhances collaboration and effectiveness when performing complex, unpredictable, urgent tasks, or new tasks. It is pointed out that, when time is tight and there are limited opportunities for public communication and debate, team members with similar mental models can anticipate their reactions and reach effective collaboration.

Professor of Management at the Wharton Business School, Nancy P rosbad, also proposed a similar theory, which she called "minority"-including gender, race, age and ethnic minorities. "Minority groups seem generally less threatening, because they have different opinions than you. However, if they are similar to you but have different opinions, some groups will find it even more disturbing. It may make the entire team restless ."

Klein investigated the factors that determine who is important to the team. The most important quality is emotional stability. "The opposite is nervousness. If someone is nervous, excited, worried, and grumpy all day, this is no good for the team ."

Within the company, individual teams often compete with each other. Vitenberger found this problem very tricky: "One of them is the problem outside the Group and within the group. Based on our self-positioning, we can be a part of the team or be independent from the team. In many companies, engineering departments and marketing departments often have disputes. But at the same time, if you are talking about confrontation between companies, these teams will stand together and they have more in common than other companies. Each team in the company is sometimes relatively independent, and they think they compete with each other rather than being motivated to work together ."

"A team that understands the importance of interpersonal communication is more successful than a team that relies on e-communication," vitinberger said about how to create a successful team. Email is a terrible media ...... It cannot convey irony or emotions well, and may lead to misunderstandings. Face-to-face communication is very important and the effect is very different ."

It is really difficult to create a team, and it is more difficult to fix it when it cannot work properly. So how can people reunite a split team? "You have to go back to the basic issues," says Miller. Does this team have a clear goal? Are team members in different regions? Team tasks? We opened a taboo course for team building, where vague goals are big taboos. Another taboo is that leaders cannot control the overall situation and organize the entire process. Third, when setting team goals, it is not possible to develop a dedicated line. Tasks must be meaningful, so that people are willing to work tirelessly ."