“If You Can’t Feed A
Team With Two Pizzas, It’s Too Large.” - Jeff Bezos (Founder and CEO Amazon)
A common rule followed at Amazon, the reason behind this is pretty
simple. More people means more thoughts, more communication, more politics,
more chaos and more of everything that would slow the process even further. As
fascinating as all of this sounds, it is indeed true. Many studies have shown
that smaller teams are much more productive and faster when it comes to a particular
task than a larger team.
A report called "The State of The American Workplace," has
found that smaller companies often have more engaged employees. If we look into
the statistics, almost 42% of the small company employees were engaged at work
against only 30% of the employees at large companies. In our PGDM College
in Hyderabad, we stress a lot upon team building and teaching out
students to work in team.
Our professors of PGDM in Hyderabad feel that small teams work better. There are a lot of stories to
back this conclusion. Below is a list of three such studies:
1.
Social Loafing
A study done by Alan Ingham in 1970s on the concept of ‘social
loafing’ concludes that the tendency to make an effort by any individual
decreases as the size of the team increases. The reason behind this it is
difficult to extract the full potential of each person in a bigger team. So
every individual thinks, “I do not really need to work as hard as I can as
there are other people who can fill the void and anyways nobody would ever know
how hard I am pulling individually.”
2.
Ringelmann Effect
Ringelmann Effect is the tendency of each team member to become less
productive as the size of the team increases. Professor Maximilien Ringelmann
was a French Professor of agricultural engineering who based this concept on an
experiment. He arranged a tug of war competition and noted that when there is
only one person pulling the rope, he gives his 100% but as the number of
individual increases, the individual effort goes down.
3.
Relational Loss
You must have noticed this all your life. A class at school is always
divided into small groups of friends and as this group of friends increases, it
tends to break further into sub groups and so on. So why this happens? A study
conducted by professor Jennifer Mueller based in San Diego describes this
concept as “Relational Loss.” It says that as the size of the team increases,
each individual feels less and less supported by others. A perception grows
among the individuals that how would a single manager be able to provide
support to such large group of people. Also how would he be able to evaluate
each person properly, thus growing a sense of uncertainty that your work won’t
be appreciated, thereby adversely affecting the productivity of each
individual.
The ‘two pizza rule’ can be a good basis to maintain the efficiency
and productivity of the organisation. The smaller teams are not only more agile
and nimble, but are also more innovative and successful.
