Doing a project with a group is undoubtedly beneficial for achieving results fast and efficiently. But the question is; will the overall group effort increase proportionally with the number of participants, or will it decrease? It depends.
Ringelmann claims that members of a group become increasingly less productive when the size of their group increases. This effect depicts the inverse relationship between the size of a group and the group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between the size of the group and group productivity, Ringelmann discovered that making group members work together on a task actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. He suggested that as more and more people join a group, the group often becomes more inefficient, ultimately negating the idea that the group efficiency depends on the size of the group. As our ancestors said, too many cooks spoil the broth.
On the other hand, some claim that the group efficiency depends on the size of the group. As a Kenyan proverb says “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable” or, to give another example, “No one can whistle a symphony; it takes a whole orchestra to play it.” These sayings have one thing in common. Both of them praise the value of being a team and staying together. Is one of us smarter than all of us?
My answer to that would be negative. Then why does some part of the population prefer to work as an individual? Because that they are introverts? I don‘t think so. The most inclusive answer would be that they find themselves much more productive when working alone compared to working in a group. The reason that working with a group doesn’t satisfy some part of the population is because that working with a group comes with many problems. The main problem is that when more people join the group, distributing the tasks evenly becomes much harder and therefore the efficiency drops. Another reason is, when the number of team members rise, people increasingly tend to believe that their personal effort is less important for the completion of the task. The last and perhaps the most discouraging thing about working in groups is the conflicts that are caused by miscommunications and denials. At least one of these problems will occur in almost every group. We can see that the inevitable disputes in groups will result in much less productivity and success compared to individual efforts. Therefore we can conclude that working with a small group or working individually will bring much more success compared to working with a large group.