Small teams are quick & more productive

 

OCTOBER 30, 2012 Tuesday  Smaller Teams Are Quicker Two-person teams took an average of just 36 minutes to assemble 50 Lego pieces into a human figure, a task that required 52 minutes for four-person teams, according to an experiment by Bradley R. Staats of the University of North Carolina, Katherine L. Milkman of Wharton, and Craig R. Fox of UCLA. Moreover, people consistently underestimate the additional time needed by larger teams, with the forecasting errors growing larger as teams get bigger. Increasing a team's size can hamper coordination, diminish members' motivation, and increase conflict, the researchers say. Source: The team scaling fallacy: Underestimating the declining efficiency of larger teams