Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (11 page)

Moderation

Group connectivity is important, but it shouldn’t be overdone. Comity can be the enemy of complexity. A group whose members are too closely connected can see the benefits of its diversity fade. That’s because while dense ties among team members may enhance the team’s solidarity, they can also impede creativity. This is particularly true for complex problem solving. Communication
networks that are highly efficient at disseminating information typically enhance short-run but not long-run performance. Why? Because inefficient communication networks maintain diversity. They are also better for exploration (they free the “mavericks”) and the long-run search for solutions.
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Obviously, this creates a paradox: you need to promote intragroup communications to overcome the obstacles created by diversity, but at the same time, if you draw the team too close together through overcommunicating, you will stifle that same diversity that is so valuable to the team’s success. The only real answer, we believe, is to
communicate regularly, but not constantly
, and to use that communication for the dissemination of new information, not for setting boundaries on members’ efforts.

Dissent

All of us have been through brainstorming sessions in which we’ve been told that we are not to judge or criticize our own or others’ ideas—at least not in the creative phase. In the real life of teams, exactly the opposite appears to be true. Experimental research on teams has shown that debate and the presence of competing views actually
stimulate
divergent and creative thought. Furthermore, permission to criticize and to debate is also conducive to idea generation. As an aside, it has been found that groups instructed to criticize and debate even in brainstorming activities did better than the groups instructed not to criticize.
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Creativity

The sociologists Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University and Jarrett Spiro of INSEAD set out to discover the ideal composition of the teams behind Broadway musicals. To do so, they studied every musical produced on Broadway between 1945 and 1989. They also
tracked the names of every known collaborator on those shows. The eventual list numbered 2,092 people who had worked on 474 musicals of new material produced during that era.

In particular, Uzzi and Spiro wanted to understand whether it was better to have a team composed of close friends who had worked together before or to have a team of strangers. An incumbent team exhibited an extremely high Q rating and a team of strangers had a low Q rating, where Q was a measurement of the density of connections in that production team.

What the two researchers found was that the relationship between Q and musical success was
curvilinear
—that is, it was thickest in the middle. Thus, when the Q was low (less than 1.7), team members did not know one another and struggled to exchange ideas and truly collaborate. By the same token, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), team members thought in too-similar ways and, as a result, stifled creativity.

They found that the best Broadway shows were produced by teams with an intermediate level of social intimacy. This ideal level of Q—called the
bliss point
—was between 2.4 and 2.6. Within this range, a musical was
three
times more likely to be a commercial success and
three
times more likely to receive critical acclaim than a musical produced by a team with a low Q or a high Q.

This suggests that the best teams enjoy a mix of old friends and newcomers. In this way, the team members are comfortable with each other and readily exchange ideas, but they are not so comfortable that they stifle creativity in each other.
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Divergence

What is the best strategy for new members when entering a team?
Conform early, diverge later
. We humans are neurologically predisposed to see new people and new ideas as potential threats. So it’s not surprising that social psychologists have found that new group
members, who invariably present new information to their teams, are often perceived as threats. And because of that, their feedback is typically dismissed, ignored, or rejected out of hand. It is only after a sufficient number of positive experiences that cement a new arrival’s status as a group member that this person’s divergent feedback is perceived as nonthreatening. Until then, the new member’s often valuable knowledge is lost.

This loss can be costly—yet solutions don’t come easily. The group members resist, reject, or ignore criticism from newcomers because it represents a threat to the group’s collective self-concept. As such, they are obliged to challenge the integrity of the message.
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As long as a person is considered by the group to be an outsider, his or her criticism is likely to be rejected even if that criticism is appropriate, well justified, and well argued.
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Not surprisingly, the same criticism made be someone considered an insider is likely to be accepted by the team.

So, what’s the answer?
Preparation
. New team members need to be taught that entering a new group and introducing divergent thoughts without having gained the group’s trust may backfire. The key, new members must be told, is to first gain group trust by conforming—and only later, when that trust has been earned, should they dissent. Obviously, this doesn’t entirely solve the problem of lost contributions at the beginning of a new member’s inclusion, but it may shorten its duration.

Experience

Cognitive abilities do not necessarily become impaired with age.
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“Cognitive fitness” is a state of optimized ability to reason, remember, learn, plan, and adapt that is enhanced by certain attitudes, lifestyle choices, and exercises. Cognitive fitness enhances people’s decision-making, problem solving, ability to manage stress and change, and openness to new ideas and alternative perspectives.
Depending on how you live your life, your brain’s anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can actually improve through experiences. Contrary to the selection for youth in places such as Silicon Valley, older members can be crucial team participants.

Proximity

The final challenge to maintaining teams’ effectiveness may come as a surprise in this age of global work teams, telepresence, and remote collaboration. An analysis of 35,000 articles across 2,000 journals by 200,000 authors for the years 1999 through 2003 shows that proximity among team members is a predictor of the quality of team outcomes.
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The researchers mapped the location of coauthors and the quality of research based on the number of subsequent citations. Physical proximity proved to be an important predictor of publication impact.
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What does this mean in light of modern telecommunications, international teams, and a global marketplace? Much depends on the definition of “proximity.” A virtual work team living on four different continents and handing off their work across twenty-four time zones and communicating via email and text is almost the embodiment of the
lack
of proximity. So the challenge in such a case is to replace traditional physical proximity with something else: regular online meetings, enhanced communications tools (such as telepresence technology), team rituals, nonwork activities, and, whenever possible, actually getting the team physically together in a single place.

THE SIZE QUESTION, AGAIN

This brings us, inevitably, to the question of team size. We have already discussed this topic extensively—and we will go into even
more depth later. For now, we want to devote ourselves to what the latest scientific research tells us about how teams should be created in terms of the number of members.

Here are some of the most interesting recent findings:

First,
team boundaries become a problem as team size increases
. In a well-bounded team, people know who is and who is not on the team. But as the team grows in size, this sense of “boundedness” becomes less clear.

Corporate management teams, as a rule, tend to be especially underbounded and overlarge. In a study of 120 top management teams, only 11 of those teams (9 percent) had a common agreement on the precise number of members on their team. This is not a minor matter: as we’ve just seen, knowledge of who is and who is not on the team is vitally important, because it enables team members to make an accurate assessment of all the available resources when developing the team’s goals. Without it, they can only make a rough, and usually inaccurate, estimate.

But that isn’t the last word on the matter, because
increasing team size does offer a range of performance benefits
. Here are some examples:

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Having more members creates the opportunity for a greater division of labor; this in turn allows for more task specialization.
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Having more members also creates a larger pool of aggregate team knowledge and experience.
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The larger the inventory of slack resources at hand, the more the team is prepared to deal with changing circumstances.
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Increasing team size, however, can also impair performance: As a team’s size increases, its functional size—that is, the number of people who are actually contributing to the team’s work—usually does not increase accordingly.
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There are no guarantees that the larger knowledge and experience pool of the expanded team will be effectively utilized.

And don’t forget the networking problem—six communication links in a four-person team and forty-five in a ten-person team. As team size increases, the need for coordination multiplies.
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And at the same time, any sharing of the technical and coordinative information needed to maintain those networks also becomes more difficult.
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There are also integration costs associated with increasing team size. It takes time and effort to incorporate new members into a team. While this happens, the team may slow, or even stop.
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And don’t forget the lesson of tugs-of-war. In groups in which individual and collective performance is inextricably tied, and individual contributions are difficult to assess, individuals—knowing that their efforts can’t be isolated—will often slack off and contribute less than their best efforts. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as
social loafing
; in economics it’s
free riding
. Experiments by the French psychologist Max Ringelmann back in 1913 showed a sharp decline in the individual efforts of men engaged in a tug-of-war.
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On average, one person pulled 139 pounds, groups of three pulled 353 pounds (that is, 15 percent less per person), and groups of eight pulled 547 pounds (51 percent less per person). Ringelmann wisely chose the tug-of-war because it presented no coordination problems—the only task was for everyone to pull hard. So, the difference in performance came down to one thing: decreased effort.
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Finally, increasing team size can also cause relational losses in knowledge-based teams. Studies have found that as team size increases, its members’ perceptions of available support diminish even when that support is available. This is important, because the belief that support and multiple high-quality relationships are available plays an important role as a buffer to stressful job experiences.
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One of the leading social scientists in the study of team size is Bibb Latané of the Center for Human Science. A pioneer of social
impact theory, Latané has made a number of important discoveries on the implications of increasing team size on team dynamics, on how order is spontaneously created in large groups, and the spread of social influence in populations. Among his findings:

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As team size increases, individual responsibility dilutes.
Latané’s work on the “bystander effect” with John Darley shows that people are less likely to help someone in an emergency if there are others around, because the responsibility to help is distributed over many people.

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As a group’s size increases, adding people yields diminishing returns on individual contributions.
The greater the number of people present, the greater will be their influence on each individual. For example, one person added to a group of two is likely to have more impact on the group than one person added to a group of twenty. Thus, the influence of unique expertise and skills in a team diminishes as team size increases. There is a trade-off between creating a thoroughly diverse team and creating a small team in which individual contributions are more easily harnessed.

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Managers and leaders tend to overestimate the benefits of larger teams.
One reason we often see teams with more than five members when a pair or trio would be obviously more effective is that managers fall for the belief that, in teams, the more, the better. In 2012, after finding field evidence for this, researchers Bradley Staats, Katherine Milkman, and Craig Fox named one version of this phenomenon, the tendency to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows, the
team scaling fallacy
.

Following Latané’s lead, other scientists have taken up the quest to find the optimal team size. Unfortunately, it’s too early to come to conclusions. However, there is some research on both how to mitigate the negative effects of large teams as well as on
how to keep team size small even when projects demand a large number of people:

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It is important to help team members perceive their task and goals as significant and meaningful. This helps mitigate social loafing. If that fails, encourage team members (through team pride) to compensate for substandard contributions from their coworkers.
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To keep team size small, managers should create multiteam projects. They can also build core and extended teams, or outsource certain tasks.
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