No Room for Loafers

The virtues of team work for the individual, the team and of course the organisation are well documented: offering a sense of belonging, cohesion and well-being.  High performing teams, work seamlessly together, putting the maximum effort into the task in hand and minimising the levels of energy expended on themselves and their personal anxieties (Tuckman).

Research undertaken by the Tavistock Institute relating to group size and dynamics indicated that the optimum size for a group is between 2 and 6, with groups between 7 and 12 starting to require stronger leadership and role allocation.To achieve the advantages that come with synergy, sometimes described as 1+1 = 3, many organisations have re-structured into teams, often led by a team leader and with the expectation that individual and group performance levels will increase, and in many cases it does.

But will performance levels automatically remain high within a group? 

At the start of the last century a French agricultural engineering professor, Max Ringlemann identified a social phenomenon which he observed over and over again. What he detected was that collective group performance regularly reduced when compared with their individual efforts.  In other words exactly the opposite of the synergistic effect.

In his experiments Ringlemann arranged for participants to pull on a rope attached to a strain gauge.  When only two individuals pulled on the rope, they exerted 93% of their individual efforts.  A group of three individuals exerted 85%, and groups of 8 exerted 49% of their combined individual effort.  This level continued to decrease the more people pulled on the rope, with each person exerting a little less effort.

This phenomenon has been termed ‘social loafing’.  To quote a Billy Connolly joke: "There were 400 Clydeside dockyard workers pulling on a rope.  When the rope snapped, no one fell over". 

So when organisations are putting together a dedicated team, taking synergy and social loafing together, underpinned by the Tavistock’s work on group size means that performance is likely to be optimal with a small enough group to ensure that everyone has to work hard to achieve the end result, and not so many that there is any scope for ‘loafing’.  

That sounds to me like 6.