One of the situations that affects the productivity of a person is working in a group or as an individual. Both of them have their own opportunities and obstacles. Research and experiments have been done to find out whether working in a group decreases the efficiency of peoples effort or not. Do you think that working in a group is a waste of time and it can cause troubles?
The Ringelmann Effect is the tendency of individual members of an group to become less and less productive as the group size increases. Maximillien Ringelmann says that if group members are working together on a task, it will result in significantly less effort than when individual members are working alone. There are two reasons for this. First one is loss of motivation, or social loafing, which is the decline in individual effort when the individuals work in a team compared to when they work alone. To reduce the level of the social loafing there a few solutions which can be tried like increasing identifiability, minimizing free-riding, setting goals and increasing involvement.The second one is loss of coordination which is state that even if group members’ abilities are enough to complete an assigned task, they may still fail to coordinate their efforts in a productive way.
In their research Ingham et al. (1974) affirmed the argument that motivational losses primarily decide the reduction in performance of a person when working as a member of a group. Besides, this research also has shown that The Ringelmann Effect may not be shown by people who had an experience working in a team sport.
However, Turkish people say “Bir elin nesi var, iki elin sesi var.” which means two heads are better than one. People sometimes can not be able to do a work by theirselves so they ask for help from other people. As many people are trying to finish the job rather than just one person, it gets easier to get it done. For example, assume that you have group project to do with your friends. You all know each others strengths and weaknesses so you do the distribution of tasks according to them. If everyone get along well with each other and do what they need to do on time, the project will be finished without any problem.
Although some problems can occur while doing the work like long descion-making process, loss of time while scheduling the meetings or conflicts between members, I think working with a group can be advantageous in many ways. Teamwork has a scope for brainstorming, which results in getting more ideas. It also helps you improve your communication and collaboration skills. Last but not the least, members will be able to learn new things.
In conclusion, despite the outlined disadvantages of group working that were explained by Ringelmann, I believe that working in a group can be really beneficial to the members and it can lead to a great success if the members try to do their best and be an effective team.