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Teams Within Teams
Project managers should pay attention to the way they divide a team into subgroups — equally sized subgroups tend to perform and collaborate better than subgroups of differing sizes, according to a new study.
Creating smaller teams within a project team is an effective way to split and complete complex tasks. But what is the best way to divide a project team into smaller groups?
One straightforward suggestion is to make the groups equal in size, according to “Friends and Enemies Within: The Roles of Subgroups, Imbalance, and Isolates in Geographically Dispersed Teams,” a research paper recently published by MIT Sloan School of Management that examined teams made up of geographically dispersed subgroups.
The study used 62 teams of six undergraduates. Each six-person team was then broken down into subgroups of different sizes with members on different campuses. Researchers Michael Boyer O’Leary and Mark Mortensen tasked each team with writing a collaborative report on a broad academic topic. The authors then examined the effects of different subgroup sizes and configurations (for example, groups of 3+3, 2+3+1, or 5+1) on team performance.
In short, they found that team configuration affects team dynamics. Teams with subgroups of unequal sizes exhibited higher levels of conflict, had greater problems with team identity, …
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