2/25/2013

Less is more !

Ebin John
ebinjp@hotmail.com

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What am I talking about!

• Relation between team size and productivity
• Different dimensions to consider when you
design a team.
• Why we do, what we do!

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How many of you have designed

teams?

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Designing teams for:

• Optimum
– Productivity
– Motivation
– Transparency
– Collaboration
– Communication
–Size
– Etc.

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Why the team size different?

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The number of people on a team

has significant impact on
performance

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People's efforts quickly diminish as

team size increases : Ringelmann Effect

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual

members of a group to become increasingly less
productive as the size of their group increases

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Productivity Vs Size

Individual contribution is inversely proportional

to the size and magnitude of a group.

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Prove it!

• Rope pulling exercise: 8 people didn’t pull as

strong as 4 individuals

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Concluded as loss of motivation and

coordination problems.

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Is it only that?

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Another Experiment!

It didn't seem to matter whether people were part of a larger

team or simply thought they were part of a larger team
they worked less hard.

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Concluded that the productivity loss is due to

Co-ordination Issues, Motivation and Social
Loafing

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social loafing

The reduction in individual effort when people

work in groups compared to when they work
alone.

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Team members reduce their effort because they

feel less responsible for the output.

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More about Social loafing

Social Facilitation and Social Influence

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Social Facilitation

Tendency for people to do better on simple

tasks in the presence of other people.

Degrade the performance of less familiar tasks!

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation

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An Example
• Ask me to talk about Agile Manifesto, I will do
a great job.
• If you ask me to fix a Junit test case, I will take
lot of time!

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Any Incidents?

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Social Influence

Occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or

behaviors are affected by others

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Social Influence
• Compliance : when people appear to agree
with others, but actually keep their dissenting
opinions private.
• Identification : when people are influenced by
someone who is liked and respected, such as a
famous celebrity.
• Internalization : when people accept a belief
or behavior and agree both publicly and
privately. Self fulfilling prophecies!

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Good to know!

Two Psychological needs that lead human to

conform to the expectations of others.

– Informational social influence : the need to be right.

– Normative social influence : the need to be liked.

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Name the Scrum activities which

are directly affected by this
• Planning
– Task break down
– Estimation
• Grooming
• Demo
• Retrospection
• ?

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How can I get over it?

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What is the ideal number?

• Researches suggests that , people tend to
prefer teams of four or, at most, five
members.
• Anything lower than four was felt to be too
small to be effective, whereas teams larger
than five became ineffective.
• Context also matters.
– Tasks variety, Multi skills, Over heads, etc.

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Small teams are more effective!

All other things being equal, that small teams

are more likely to optimize their performance
when faced with slightly fewer members than
the task at hand requires.

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What are the other options?

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Not doing anything isn't an option

The team members you risk losing aren't the

weakest but highest performers.

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Option 1
• Divide up a complex task into manageable
bits, where every member of the team is
accountable for one bit of it.

Source: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/task-boards

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Option 2
Generate a sense of urgency

Provided that people are capable, all one needs

to do is to give them something to care about
more than themselves.

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Option 3
Make weaker team members feel
disproportionately responsible for the team
underperforming.

The Köhler Effect:

No one wants to be the weakest link of any group. As a result,
weaker individuals in the group respond to this by expending more
effort than they would had they been working alone.

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Option 4
Provide greater transparency by opening up
your feedback mechanism.
Make things painfully visible.

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Questions / Comments

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Thank you 

Email:ebinjp@hotmail.com

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