When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex and expanding organizations, there is no hard-and-fast rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team.
Should the most productive team have 4.6 team members, as suggested in a recent article on "How to Build a Great Team" in Fortune magazine? What about naming five or six individuals to each team, which is the number of MBA students chosen each year by Wharton for its 144 separate learning teams? Is it true that larger teams simply break down, reflecting a tendency towards "social loafing" and loss of coordination? Or is there simply no magic team number, a recognition of the fact that the best number of people is driven by the team's task and by the roles each person plays?
"The size question has been asked since the dawn of social psychology," says Wharton management professor Jennifer S. Mueller, recalling the early work of Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer born in 1861 who discovered that the more people who pulled on a rope, the less effort each individual contributed. Today, "teams are prolific in organizations. From a managerial perspective, there is this rising recognition that teams can function to monitor individuals more effectively than managers can control them. The teams function as a social unit; you don't need to hand-hold as much. And I think tasks are becoming more complex and global, which contributes to the need for perspective that teams provide."
Each Person Counts
While the study of team size is one of her areas of concentration, Mueller and other Wharton management experts acknowledge that size is not necessarily the first consideration when putting together an effective team.
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