Why you need to know this: if your teams are busier than ever while output slows, your best people are drowning and adding headcount seems to make it worse; this article explains why, and what you can do about it.
Managing knowledge workers means managing several difficult problems at once. Their output is hard to see and hard to attribute; the work bounces between specialists, at least 65 per cent of them belong to more than one team at a time (O’Leary, Mortensen & Woolley, 2011), much of the work happens at the team’s edges, and when Microsoft sent its staff home, collaboration across groups fell by about a quarter (Yang et al., 2022). Each problem feeds the others, and the usual fixes - more people, more meetings and more exhortation - tend to make the problems worse.
The cost is dramatic, and old. In rope-pulling trials in the 1880s, fourteen people pulled with the force of about ten (Kravitz & Martin, 1986). Even blindfolded people who were in fact pulling alone dropped to 85 per cent of their solo effort when they believed others were pulling with them (Ingham et al., 1974). Most of what teams lose is not laziness, but effort nobody can see.
Effort drains where contribution is invisible. People hold back when their effort cannot be identified, seems redundant or might be exploited (Karau & Williams, 1993), and distance and size make holding back easier to justify (Alnuaimi et al., 2010).
Every new person costs more than the last. Fourteen people have 91 possible pairings, and seventeen have 136. Across 21,435 teams, size had no average link with performance, helping on complex work and hurting on simple work that needs heavy coordination, while larger teams showed more deviance and withdrawal (Bernerth et al., 2023).
The best people carry the weight. A small minority of employees, often 3 to 5 per cent, provides a fifth to a third of the value-adding collaboration, and those people end up among the least engaged in the organisation (Cross et al., 2016).
The mix of people decides which way it goes. A team’s average personality tells you little (Han et al., 2024). In my study of 48 knowledge-work teams, a mix of conscientious and less conscientious members did more harm than a team that was uniformly less conscientious; highly agreeable teams were pulled into other teams’ work at the expense of their own, and several helpful combinations turned harmful when the work was highly interdependent (Keca, 2019).
What changes is its design. Make each person’s pull visible, size teams to the work, match interdependence and rewards to the task, take the load off the hubs, protect focused time, and compose teams deliberately, starting with even conscientiousness.