that larger teams simply break down, reflecting a tendency towards “social loafing” and loss of coordination? Or is there simply no magic team number, a recognition of the fact that the best number of people is driven by the team’s task and by the roles each person plays?
“The size question has been asked since the dawn of social psychology,” says Wharton management professor Jennifer S. Mueller, recalling the early work of Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer born in 1861 who discovered that the more people who pulled on a rope, the less effort each individual contributed. Today, “teams are prolific in organizations. From a managerial perspective, there is this rising recognition that teams can function to monitor individuals more effectively than managers can control them. The teams function as a social unit; you don’t need to hand- hold as much. And I think tasks are becoming more complex and global, which contributes to the need for perspective that teams provide.”
EACH PERSON COUNTS While the study of team size is one of her areas of concentration, Mueller and other Wharton management experts acknowledge that size is not necessarily the first consideration when putting together an effective team. “First, it’s important to ask what type of task the team will engage in,” Mueller says. Answering that question “will define whom you want to hire, what type of skills you are looking for. A sub-category to this is the degree of coordination required. If it’s a sales team, the only real coordination comes at the end. It’s all individual, and people are not interdependent. The interdependence matters, because it is one of the mechanisms that you use to
determine if people are getting along.” Second, she says, “what is the team composition? What are the skills of the people needed to be translated into action? That would include everything from work style to personal style to knowledge base and making sure that they are appropriate to the task.” And third, “you want to consider
size.” The study of optimal team size seems to fascinate a lot of businesses and academics, primarily due to the fact that “in the past decade, research on team effectiveness has burgeoned as teams have become increasingly common in organizations of all kinds,” writes Wharton management professor Katherine J. Klein, in a paper titled, “Team Mental Models and Team Performance.” The paper, co-authored with Beng-Chong Lim,
a professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, was published in January 2006 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. In an interview, Klein
acknowledges that when it comes to team size, each person counts. “When you have two people, is that a team or a dyad? With three, you suddenly have the opportunity to have power battles, two to one. There is some notion that three is dramatically different from two, and there is some sense that even numbers may be different from odd numbers, for the same reason. My intuition is that by the time you are over eight or nine people, it is cumbersome and you will have a team that breaks down into sub-teams. Depending on the group’s task, that could be a good thing or
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