In theory, working as a group is a wonderful idea. Allowing multiple individuals to work together and combine technical knowledge, differing perspectives, and even general competencies sounds wonderful. However, it seems all too often that group work goes wrong when too many people are involved. Things become overly complex, and as this happens bureaucracy needs to become ever more expansive to keep the organization running at all. So, is there a critical mass for a group? Somewhere between the realm of a partnership and a committee is there a perfect number of people such that the group may benefit from the amplified productivity effects of working together without getting bogged down in organizational gridlock?
I would say yes, and that in my experience teams of around 4 or 5 people tend to work very well together and maintain high effectiveness as well as high efficiency in their goals. In my own life, I have had the pleasure of being on such a team, and it was just last year in my Econ 471 class. Along with 3 group mates, my group and I were tasked with a project in which we were to come up with an economic question from "the real world" and source the data to analyze potential answers. My group mates and I had worked together on the homework in the past, so it was natural for us to form a group for the project. Since there were very few of us and we generally trusted each other we had no problems laying out our project and then going about completing it. After a single discussion of about five minutes, we agreed that we wanted to investigate the how meaningful different metrics of automotive fuel efficiency were in terms of how much they contributed to the perceived fuel efficiency, as compared to EPA and Consumer Reports estimates. Once we had this down all four of us divided up different variables and began farming data from many sources all over the internet. Since there were four of us doing this together, we got nearly all the data we needed at our first meeting. After that, it was a simple matter of combining the data into a single body and analyzing it with Stata. Once we had performed the analysis, we all wrote a bit of the final report and combined them into a comprehensive document. All in all, we got our project time without a single hitch.
This team was the most effective group I have worked with in recent memory. With hardly any need for decisive management, no shirking of work among any members, and task completion in less time than we expected, this was the perfect example of how a small group can be a perfect unit of effort.
It may be that in the case you describe the writing part was only a small bit of what you did and therefore there was no need to argue through the presentation. My experience with co-authoring, however, suggest something quite different. Even if there is division of labor on who writes what in the first draft, there is then heated discussion afterward about whether the various parts fit and if they say what we really want them to say. Katzenbach and Smith talk about each member owning the entire product of the group. This argument over the final version of the paper is how such ownership manifests.
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting point. Although my team was ultimately able to reach a consensus in terms of our final document, I can see where problems could arise in a less quantitative report. I would say that each of the group members did indeed have an ownership stake in the project, but since the written components of the project were simply elaborations upon our findings from the data analysis there was not as much potential for argument. The lack of conflict may have also been due in part to the culture of the group, which was more of a "let's do this right, but let's just get it done" mentality as opposed to a more professional one, in which academic reputations and monetary rewards would be at stake.
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