3 Reasons Why Smaller Teams Are More Efficient Than Bigger Teams

“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.