MANAGEMENT
that could not be right. There is a sense that as a team gets larger, there is a tendency for social loafing, where someone gets to slide, to hide.” Ringelmann’s famous study on pulling a rope — often called the Ringelmann effect — analyzed people alone and in groups as they pulled on a rope. Ringelmann then measured the pull force. As he added more and more people to the rope, Ringelmann discovered that the total force generated by the group rose, but the average force exerted by each group member declined, thereby discrediting the theory that a group team effort results in increased effort. Ringelmann attributed this to what was then called “social loafing” — a condition where a group or team tends to “hide” the lack of individual effort.
“After about five people, there are diminishing returns on how much people will pull,” says Mueller. “But people, unless they are not motivated or the task is arbitrary, will not want to show social loafing. If the task is boring and mundane, they are more likely to loaf. If you tell executives this, they say, ‘One of the things I’m worried about is loafing and free riding.’ Whereas social loafing is decreased effort in a group context relative to individual context, free riding is rational and self-interested. If a person is not going to be rewarded, they say, ‘I’m going to free ride’ and they don’t participate as much. The two concepts are hard to distinguish, but they are just different ways to measure similar outcomes.”
THE NUMBER SIX Evan Wittenberg, director of the Wharton Graduate Leadership Program, notes that team size is “not necessarily an issue people think about immediately, but it is important.” According to Wittenberg, while the research on optimal team numbers is “not conclusive, it does tend to fall into the five to 12 range, though some say five to nine is best, and the number six has come up a few times.” But having a good team depends
on more than optimal size, Wittenberg adds. For instance, when Wharton assigns five to six MBA students to individual teams, “we don’t just assign those teams. We make sure they can be effective. We have a ‘learning team retreat’ where we take all 800 students out to a camp in the woods in upstate New York and spend two days doing team building and trust building exercises. I think this is what people forget to do when they create a team in a business — spend a lot of time upfront to structure how they will work together. We get to know each other and share individual core values so we can come up with team values. But most importantly, we have the students work on their team goals, their team norms and their operating principles. Essentially, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it?” In the work world, says Wittenberg, it has been “reinforced that five or six is the right number (on a team). At least for us, it gives everyone a real work out. But frankly, I think it depends on the task.” Recent research by Mueller
would seem to support Wittenberg’s notion that preparation for team success is vital. In a recent paper, “Why Individuals in Larger Teams Perform Worse,” Mueller channeled Ringelmann’s theories on large group efforts and tried to explain why the title of her paper is true.
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DOMmagazine.com | june 2020
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