An inverse relationship exists between group size and productivity which shows that group effort does not necessarily lead to increased effort from the group members.
In an experiment, a group was asked to pull a rope. As more people were added, the average performance significantly decreased. This seems to show that each participant felt their own efforts were not critical and further studies showed that motivational losses were largely to blame for an individual’s decline in performance.
See also:
- Baumol’s cost disease is similar in that salaries can rise without any material gain in productivity simply salaries of other roles went up.
- Larger informal groups can have other negative consequences such as opaque decision making and lack of accountability.
Links to this note
-
Imagine a busy executive trying to work with multiple people. They’re coming in and out of meetings and working on several projects all day long. They have maybe 15 minutes to concentrate on a thing to try and keep things moving or prevent holding things up. Every time there is a broken link, spelling error, obviously incorrect statement, or something that needs to be double checked, it creates delays and more work.
-
Turn off Notifications on All Devices Except One
After a large uptick in notifications, I’m experimenting with turning off notifications on all devices except one. This change helps me maintain focus and feel less overwhelmed.
-
Productive engineers should write one pull request per day. One pull request per day creates forward momentum. Forward momentum leads to progress. Progress is how teams overcomes their biggest challenges.
-
A right-half-plane zero is when the exponential growth rate of an input does not affect the output. For example, eating ice cream increases happiness but creates more unhappiness so you eat more ice cream to make up for it and so on until there is no ice cream anywhere.