Group Dynamics: Can Less Be More?

Over the past two years, after witnessing all the drama with legacy mega-retailers going out of business, and other business models, such as e-commerce operations like at Amazon, coming into the competition fray, I made a conscious decision to [temporarily] immerse myself into the retail world; an ancient business sector that probably shall endure as long as there are groups of human beings still alive.

My objective was to acquire a relatively unbiased view of how business and information technology (IT) models, processes, and systems, are aligned and utilized in retail to give businesses in the sector a competitive edge against each other (differentiation for competition).

As a couple of examples, I wanted to understand why Amazon was growing while Sears (one of the earliest mail order businesses in the Americas, with experience dating back to the 1800's) was failing... what are the factors that keep Walmart and Amazon operating nose-to-nose.

I believed, and still believe, that the best way to learn the details of a system is by being an acting [integral and dedicated] "insider." I knew that these are lessons which I will earn, and will be able to take back to my career field and use to manage my teams better... and, also, this data will enable me to cater to, and maintain the attraction of, my 'customers' using the same acquired powers (customer retention).

"Retail is a customer business. You’re trying to take care of the customer—solve something for the customer; and there’s no way to learn that in the classroom or in the corner office, or away from the customer. You’ve got to be in front of the customer." –Erik Nordstrom, President, Nordstrom Direct

Within the first year, I figured everything I practically [strategically] needed to learn about business<>IT alignment in retail, the advantages and challenges, but there was more that enticed me and encouraged my decision to remain serving in the industry a bit longer. As a leader, I recognize that a better understanding of human dealings with teams and customers (human factors)—especially in such an aggressive business—can add tremendous value towards a person's strategy for growth and success in any sector, including my profession of project and program management... after all, all business is about people, to people, for people. In my current view, there is no better Petri culture dish to study, and understand, this in as the aggressive retail and sales world.

"A guy named Charlie Beacham was my first mentor at Ford. He taught me the importance of the dealers, and he rubbed my nose in the retail business." —Lee Iacocca

The subject of this article...

One of the events I frequently observed was a behavioral attribute; I observed that there were many industrious team members who would start slacking off when there were additional team members on duty. When they are working on their own, or with another person, they'd be on top of their game, but, when the number of team members on duty increased up to a certain number, these same industrious people would become mediocre in their productivity. I wondered if that was a consistent outcome... it was.

"Curiosity [almost] killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back!"

How I almost got killed is a story for another day! Meanwhile, I became more curious at that stage, and decided to do some bona-fide research on the matter to see if this has been scientifically documented, and guess what... Lo and behold! I found out that the observation was made as far back in time as the 1300s! The observer was the French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931).

Max illustrated the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss and group productivity. He found that having group members work together on a task actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Furthermore, Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.

Moreover, Alan Ingham and three colleagues, in the 1970s, decided to recreate Ringelmann's experiment in the basement of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Whereas their replica of Ringelmann’s experiment produced near-identical results, a clever variation on it—where, unbeknownst to others, some students were asked to merely pretend they were pulling the rope—generated an extraordinary observation. It didn’t seem to matter whether people were part of a larger team or simply thought they were part of a larger team—they worked less hard. Thus in a team of six (where three had been asked to pull as hard as they could and three others instructed to pretend), those actually pulling the rope put in only as much effort as they had previously done in teams of six.

This did not surprise me one bit, due to where I was coming from, and what I have seen for myself, and had to deal with to maintain my own "professional image" since I was not going to "squeal" on anyone. This is not something that I had to consciously contend with in a decade-and-a-half of project and program management (or so I thought)... it fascinated me as a professional who has constructed and lead high performance teams before! Then, as I learned more, I started to recognize that I have dealt with this mentality before... I even wrote about it in some of my past articles!

An example I shared in the past was one where I talked about a project manager on a team I was not leading, but I had to work with; the man was not responsive and was—more often than not—late on making his deliverables (constraints for other team members) delaying the collective effort. I had reported the problem to his manager, but that action resulted in no change. One day, casually, I stopped by his desk, and struck a casual conversation; during that conversation I praised how much responsibility he had, and acknowledged it as the reason he is not able to deliver on time (being swamped); which, to my surprise, he denied the "excuse" I manufactured on his behalf, and simply stated [and I slightly paraphrase] that "this is how it is here [at the company], it's the culture, and I'm not going to rock the boat. I'm here to put-in my eight hours, then go home to my family... if the work is not finished, someone else can do it, and if they want it from me, they can wait."

Where else can we find such examples?

At school...

I witnessed the same at school, among students: when they were working on their own projects, there’s were a few option's for them but to do the work, because it won’t get done otherwise; but, when some collaborated with others on projects, the pressure came-off them... if the projects sunk, "it wasn't necessarily their fault;" so I observed that less ownership can lead to less motivation there too.

At the work place...

Aside of my first-hand experiences, there are certain examples of social loafing in the workplace that are discussed by James Larsen in his essay "Loafing on The Job." For example, builders working vigorously on a construction site while some of their colleagues are lounging on rock walls or leaning on their shovels doing nothing.

Another example is at a restaurant such as McDonald's, where some employees lounge about while others are eager to take an order. These scenarios all express the problems that social loafing creates in a workplace, and businesses seek to find a way to counteract these trends. Larsen mentions ways that a business could change its operations in order to fight the negative effects of social loafing. For one, research has shown that if each employee has his performance individually measured, he will put in more effort than if it were not measured.

Kenneth Price, from the University of Texas conducted a social loafing experiment in order to examine whether two key factors that he suspected played a role in the way social loafing arose in work groups. These two factors were "dispensability" and "fairness." The experiment that he conducted involved 514 people who were divided into 144 teams that were set to meet for fourteen weeks. The projects assigned to these people were complex and called for diverse skills from many different individuals in order to be fully completed. The experiments findings did in fact corroborate Price's suspicions in the two factors of dispensability and fairness.

Dispensability in a group is described by Price as employees who join a work group and quickly begin to gauge their skills vis à vis their co-workers. If they perceive that their skills are inferior to those around them, they tend to sit back and let the more skilled workers carry the workload. Fairness in a group is when some group members feel that their voice is not heard in decision-making because of their ethnicity, gender or other arbitrary factors. Instead of fighting for their voice to be heard many group members will decide to loaf in these circumstances.

To be fair, while some people are just plain lazy, most don’t necessarily slack off on purpose. "You show up, don’t you? You check a few things off your list, you respond to a few emails, you manage to fill your time-sheet. But unless your boss or team is expecting something from you specifically, how much work are you actually getting done? What are you accomplishing?"

I can now attest to the fact that the impact of the Ringelmann effect may seem relatively small on one project with a strong leader, but a culture of the same can be overwhelming and disastrous on the scale of a program, or on a company’s productivity overall.

When people within a team are slacking, the group dynamic shifts: projects are less efficient, responsibilities are unbalanced, and other employees are overworked and unhappy, which is a marked way to loose your high performers especially if they are not recognized in tangible ways.

In politics...

It is to be noted, that social loafing can be used as an "activist" tool by "entitled" feeling individuals... observe the following video of Stephen Miller's speech while running for Student Government:

Another example is when it comes to voting [in the United States]. Even though most people say that voting is important, and a right that should be exercised, every election a sub-optimal percentage of Americans turn out to vote, especially in presidential elections (only 51 percent in the 2000 election). One vote may feel very small in a group of millions, so people may not think a vote is worth the time and effort. If too many people think this way, there is a small voter turnout. Some countries enforce compulsory voting to eliminate this effect.

In the Military...

The 1994 Black Hawk shoot-down incident. On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters over northern Iraq, killing all 26 soldiers on board. The details of the incident were analyzed by West Point Professor Scott Snook in his book Friendly Fire.

In his summary of the fallacy of social redundancy, Snook points to social loafing as a contributor to the failure of the AWACS aircraft team to track the helicopters and prevent the shoot-down. Snook asserts that responsibility was "spread so thin by the laws of social impact and confused authority relationships that no one felt compelled to act."

In life in general, and the bystander effect...

It's been observed that the Ringelmann effect appears beyond the above mentioned environments... It is why you feel like you can clap more softly in a crowd. It’s why dozens of people watched Kitty Genovese get murdered in New York in 1964, because everyone thought someone else was doing something about it. While the latter example technically illustrates the bystander effect, but it does relate.

In bullets; triggers...

Reading the cited entries listed in Wikipedia, the following causes were listed:

• Diffusion of responsibility

As the number of people in a group or team increases, people tend to feel deindividuation. This term defines both the dissociation from individual achievement and the decrease of personal accountability, resulting in lower exerted effort for individuals in collaborative environments. This phenomenon can thus decrease overall group effectiveness because it is contagious and hard to correct. Once identified by the group or team leader, it becomes the leader's responsibility to reassess and put into motion new rules and expectations for everyone.

People could simply feel "lost in the crowd", so they feel that their effort would not be rewarded even if they put it forth. This idea can also cause people to feel as though they can simply "hide in the crowd" and avoid the averse effects of not applying themselves.

When enthusiasm for the overall goal or task is diminished, overall contribution will drop. When one feels that their overall efforts are reduced or unimportant, they will likely become social loafers.

• Motivation

Social psychological literature has found that the level of motivation one has to engage in an activity influences one's behavior in a group setting. This finding, deemed the collective effort model by Karau and Williams (1993, 2001) details that individuals who are more motivated are more likely to engage in social facilitation (that is, to increase one's efforts when in the presence of others) whereas those who are less motivated are more likely to engage in social loafing. Researchers have determined that two factors which determine an individual's motivation, and subsequently whether or not the individual will resort to social loafing versus social facilitation, include the individual's expectations about attaining the goal and the perceived value of the goal.

Thus, a person's attitude toward these two factors will influence his or her motivation level and subsequent group behavior. Karau and Williams also found that motivation was highest when the individual believed that the goal was easily attainable and very valuable. On the other hand, motivation was lowest when the goal seemed impossible and not at all valuable.

Unfortunately, the presence of a group can influence one's perception of these two factors in a number of ways. For instance, working in a group may reduce or increase one's expectancy of attaining a goal. That is, depending on the qualities of the group members, an individual may find herself in a group of high achievers who work hard and are guaranteed success, whereas another may equally find himself in a group of lazy or distracted people, making success seem unattainable. Therefore, the link between one's personal efforts and success is not direct, as our success is influenced by the work of others. Similarly, the value of the goal may be contingent on the group members. For instance, if we must share success with all other group members, then the value of the goal is reduced compared to the value of the goal from an individual perspective. Hence, the dynamic of the group is an important key in determining a person's motivation and the likelihood of social loafing. Additional factors which have been found to influence the likelihood of social loafing include one's gender, cultural background, and the complexity of the task.

• Dispensability of effort

When a group member does not feel that his or her effort is justified in the context of the overall group, the individual will be less willing to expend the effort. If the group size is large, members can feel that their contribution will not be worth much to the overall cause because so many other contributions can or should occur. This leads people to not contribute as much or at all in large groups as they might have in smaller groups.

• "Sucker" effect / Aversion

Some people feel that others in the group will leave them to do all the work while they take the credit. Because people do not want to feel like the "sucker", they wait to see how much effort others will put into a group before they put any in. If all the members try to avoid being the sucker, then everyone's effort will be significantly less than it would be if all of them were working as hard as they could.[17]

For example, in a workplace environment, the establishment of an absence culture creates an attitude that all employees deserve to have a certain number of days of absence, regardless of whether or not they are actually sick. Therefore, if an employee has not used the maximum number of absence days, "he may feel that he is carrying an unfair share of the workload."

• Attribution and equity; matching of effort

Jackson and Williams (1985) proposed that if someone feels that others in the group are slacking off or that others will loaf, he will lower his effort to match that of the others. This can occur whether it is apparent that the others are slacking or if someone simply believes that the group is slacking. For example, in the Latane, et al., study, if a participant heard the others making less noise than anticipated, he could have lowered his effort in an attempt to equal that of the others, rather than aiming for the optimum.

• Submaximal goal setting

By setting a goal that is based on maximization, people may feel that there is a set level that the group needs to be achieved. Because of this, they feel that they can work less hard for the overall desired effect.

For example, in the [aforementioned] Latane et al. "clapping and shouting" study, people who were alone but told that they were part of a group screaming or clapping could have thought that there was a set level of noise that experimenters were looking for, and so assumed they could work less hard to achieve this level depending on the size of the group.

So, how do we deal with such a challenge, especially in project management?

Teams, and especially Agile teams, cannot tolerate this type of behavior for very long so keeping our teams small and self-accountable is important, and I know that from operating as a member of "A-Teams" and "Red Teams" for many years... each team member (their experience and projected efforts) critically count... no place for slackers at all!

Here are a couple of tips for how you can overcome the Ringlemann effect and keep your teams dynamic and lean:

Educate. The following videoed experiment says it all.

Establish your ideal team size. Many organizations, now, use the “two pizza” rule for building teams. A team should never need more than two pizzas to feed them. So somewhere between 5 to 9 people feels about right, depending on team appetite of course. The Scrum Guide states a team should be no larger than 9 people so if you start to hit double-digits, you are probably too big.

Intentionally monitor team size. If you are managing multiple teams, especially when leading multiple interrelated global project efforts remotely, with nested teams, use a live dashboard to keep track of how your team human resources/size is changing. Team size will often creep up over time unless you are intentional about it. Note that team member turnover in project management—today—can be very high, especially when relying on [part time] contracted resources who are not directly under your management.

Keep them motivated. Regardless of team size, but especially with larger teams, work with the product owner to make sure the team has a compelling vision to work towards. Obviously, any team without a vision will have issues, but a large team without a vision will slowly but surely begin to die.

Learn what an effective team “sounds” like. You may have observed this watching a sport event... a well-functioning team has an energy about it; it’s a natural buzz of energy, engagement, and potential. Like a high-tension power line, you can’t see the current but you can feel that the power is there, and even hear a buzz! If the team begins to grow quieter than usual, they may be under the influence of the Ringelmann effect, or, perhaps another dysfunction of a team.

It is interesting to point out that research has also shown that participants who have previous experience in a team sport may not show the Ringelmann effect.

Last but not least, it's been observed that the difficulty with studies of this type—and their applicability to today’s workplace—is that they do not always account for task variety, where some tasks require a much larger skill set than represented by four or five individuals. Nor do they account for some people being more skilled at managing large teams than others. But they do remind us that smaller teams are generally better and, all other things being equal, that teams are more likely to optimize their performance when faced with slightly fewer members than the task at hand requires.

In summary...

If reducing the size of your current team is not an option, how might you go about preventing or tackling social loafing? Not doing anything isn’t an option—as I stated before, the team members you risk losing aren’t the weakest but highest performers. Your best performers typically resent the company of those who don’t pull their weight, particularly if the reward system doesn’t adequately discriminate between average and top performance.

• One option I follow as a project and program manger: divide-up a complex task into manageable bits, and assign them where every [qualified] member of the team is accountable for one bit of it. Acknowledge and recognize team member's efforts; give credit where it is due.
• A second option is to generate a sense of urgency. Provided that people are capable, all one needs to do is to give them something to care about more than themselves. The real problem is that this is difficult to do consistently.

"A leader is a dealer in hope." – Napoleon Bonaparte

• A third option is to make weaker team members feel disproportionately responsible for the team under-performing—something formally known as the K?hler effect. While I'm not a real fan of this approach by far, becasue I see it as borderline emotional blackmailing, this effect was first described by the German industrial psychologist Otto K?hler in the 1920s. He asked members of a Berlin rowing club to perform a difficult task: to do standing curls with a heavy weight—97 pounds (44 kg)—until they were so exhausted that they could not go on. Sometimes they did this alone, and sometimes they did it in two- or three-person groups. When they worked in groups, they held a single weighted bar. The bar was twice as heavy for two-person groups and three times as heavy for three-person groups. Thus, the group task was conjunctive—as soon as any group member quit, the rest of the group could not continue very long. K?hler found that the groups persisted longer than their weakest members had persisted as individuals. That surprising motivation gain was biggest when the members of the groups were moderately different in ability. If the difference in ability was very small, or it if was very big, the motivation gain was not as large.
• A fourth option is to provide greater transparency by opening up your feedback mechanism. While not necessarily applicable in all environments, sports have the edge here in that, particularly in elite environments, systems are designed to measure performance on an ongoing basis, aided by increasingly sophisticated technologies. For example, in early 2007 the Cambridge University Boat Club embarked on a controversial experiment. Each week they would post not only objective performance results on the inside door of their ground floor gym but, right next to it, a sheet with five columns to cover subjective assessments by the coaching team. With your name in the first column, the coaches told you what you did well in the second column, and what you didn’t do so well in the third column. The fourth and fifth columns were reserved for what you should stop doing, or start doing, immediately. Though somewhat uncomfortable, this left few places to hide. We can witness a similar methodology being used on the reality show Hell's Kitchen–utilized by Chef Gordon Ramsey, and stereotypically during Boot Camp.
• Watch out for "brown-nosers"... they tend to be some of the biggest social loafers...

Thoughts?