How Large is the Perfect Team?

The conventional wisdom of office managers is that the highest performing teams contain between five to seven members. With each additional body, the theory goes, a team either gets diminishing returns or suffers a decline in productivity. The reason is a phenomenon called “social loafing,” a tendency among members of large groups to work less hard when they feel their idleness won’t be noticed.

NovoEd’s online platform is built around team formation, so we’ve long been interested in what dynamics contribute most to team performance. The size question is fundamental. Are online teams influenced by the same size constraints as real-world teams? If not, at what point does an online team become too large for its own good?

The numbers tell a compelling story.

We pulled data from seven courses recently offered on our platform, on subjects as broadly diverse as technology entrepreneurship, music theory, and world history. Teams in these courses ranged in size from one to nine members. We looked at the percentage of total assignments completed by each team, and then graphed the average assignment completion rate based on team size.

Here’s the graph:

Team Completion Rate Graph

Teams of one are the lowest performing. Across the seven courses, NovoEd hosted 1,734 one-person teams, which on average managed to complete only 34.48% of total assignments. (We’ve long known that individual learners are less productive than groups, which is one reason NovoEd stresses team formation in all its courses.)

Productivity jumps by 34% when learners work in pairs, with teams of two on average completing 46.24% of total assignments. Somewhat surprisingly, the benefit of a third person is only a marginal boost in productivity — a paltry 10% increase. Additional teammates, however, offer more noticeable benefits, with teams of seven boasting the best results. On average, they manage to complete 89.33% of total assignments.

Teams larger than this perform less well. Teams of nine, for example, are just barely more effective than teams of four.

Here’s a table of the results.

Team Size Table

What this tells us is that online teams face broadly similar constraints to their real-world counterparts. We can conclude that the effects of social loafing are indeed just as pernicious in the virtual realm. NovoEd users who want to optimize their team performance should take into account that you can have too much of a good thing.