New study reveals having large teams in business isn’t always better

Businesses all around the world may need to reassess how they structure their teams. For the most part, large teams are the best as they have so many different minds working together. Smaller teams tend to try and make up for their lack of broad quality with a more creative mindset.

This is natural in teams that are given projects as the more people who can work together, you will have a better result but fewer people in the project can stretch the overall final product. However, recently a paper in Nature has come out with data showing that larger teams are not always better.

This doesn’t mean that small teams are inherently better or improved but it does suggest that every business owner needs to make sure each team isn’t just large for the sake of it. It’s also to be noted that this paper was making this claim for the science and tech industries. The key point of the paper is that after analyzing 65 million projects, it has been noted that smaller teams are likely to produce more innovative research.

Smaller teams are specialized

Think about it, if you can give a small team a specific project in mind they are more likely to create a much higher quality result than if you were to ask them to do something more broad. However, a large team is usually only given large tasks. It makes sense because you wouldn’t want to give them a small task as it wastes time, resources and their efficiency.

Instead, it should be advised that business leaders give smaller team specialized projects. This could be as part of a larger project because each component of the project would be far higher quality than if a large team was handling each project all at once.

Therefore if you do have a marketing problem, or maybe you need to find a solution regarding a design flaw, it’s better to assemble a small team to only focus on this new project.

Less disruption is caused

Perhaps the biggest issue with very large teams is the role overlap. Too many people are given roles similar to each other which results in the inevitable conflict. Where there is disruption, productivity begins to decline.

However as the leader of a business, how could you possibly monitor who is doing what? With the aid of a team dynamics software you can properly organize your employees into the roles and objectives they have been assigned to. When everyone is clear about their boundaries, team members are more likely to focus on their job at hand and leave others to do the same.

Large teams focus on the proven

Larger teams are more likely to look at the past and research what worked and why. However, smaller teams are more likely to point out what didn’t work and then identify why this could possibly be.

It’s important to note however, that smaller teams are more likely to identify what didn’t go right in previous projects and research, but rather than go with any particular solution, they will ask a question as to how it could be fixed. This needs to be acknowledged because larger teams are going to find a solution or rather an improved solution for their objective.

Perhaps this is because larger teams are always assigned more important projects whereas a smaller team will be given something not as defining. Again, this should be seen as a positive because smaller teams can therefore focus on one aspect and refine it over and over.

Threat assessment

A large project team has many minds in it that all have different solutions to the problems they face. By contrast, a small team doesn’t have this and so a great propensity to assess possible threats exists. As they say, there is greater safety in numbers which rings absolutely true sometimes in business.

When you have more people looking in at a project, they can bounce ideas off each other and have many more variables that they can discuss. They have more options at their feet essentially. A smaller team will be more inclined to take an educated safe route that they know will produce good results.

There’s a more apprehensive approach to what could be the right solution which is why more often than not, research of what and why went wrong is more popular.

In the science and tech industries, there is so much room for creativity. However they are very competitive industries respectively, so making sure that your teams aren’t too large where maybe innovation begins to fade is a very good idea.