This article, which discusses the Ringelmann effect (the larger the team, the smaller the individual effort), dovetails very nicely with our own work on Visible Effort. In fact, our work is a variation on the Köhler effect: top team collaborators try harder as the other team members slack on their task…
Why is it that American football uses eleven players, Canadian football twelve, and Gaelic fifteen? Why eleven in European soccer? Why does baseball field nine players, basketball five, volleyball six, water polo seven, and cricket eleven? Simple as these questions are, they are deceptively hard to answer. But whatever the historical reasons, the number of people on a team has significant impact on performance. Here’s why.
via Why Less Is More in Teams – Mark de Rond – Harvard Business Review.
