What is your technique or way of thinking when asking whether the task itself is suited to teamwork?
I recently stumbled across the article, “When do teams outperform individuals?” A new Wharton study suggests that decades of conflicting evidence can be explained by one overlooked element: the task tself.
The researchers recruited 1,231 participants to complete 20 tasks, either alone or in groups of three or six. Outcomes varied sharply: depending on the task, teams either performed three times worse than the strongest individual or, conversely, outperformed them by 60%.
These findings underscore how difficult it is to predict whether a team will succeed at a specific task.
What, then, causes teams to struggle with certain tasks?
People often assume, for example, that creativity is best achieved in teams. Yet, the researchers found that groups did not automatically perform better or worse on creative tasks. Whereas teams excelled at tasks with clear answers, such as constructing words from letters, they struggled with open-ended creative tasks, such as writing and selecting the best product slogan.
Tasks with verifiable answers led to highly efficient teamwork because everyone could quickly recognize when someone had found the right solution. By contrast, tasks without a single best answer created greater uncertainty and, consequently, greater conflict. Ultimately, that conflict hampered team performance.
The researchers also tested whether team size changed the picture, comparing individuals with groups of three and six. Crucially, however, any advantage of a larger group still depended on the nature of the task.
As Xinlan Emily Hu, a postdoctoral associate at MIT who led the research while completing her PhD at Wharton, noted, “When managers design teams, there’s often a focus on just getting brilliant people together in the room, without looking at whether the task supports those brilliant people.”
The bottom line: Companies may need to focus less on bringing together talented people and more on matching teams to the right kinds of work.
Here is the link to the article:
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articl...ndividuals/
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