What Is the Optimal Group Size for Decision-making?

6 Comments

Pawel Brodzinski Posted on 6:11 am - January 23, 2014

Hi Sheila,

Interestingly enough Anita Woolley in her research also mentions that collective intelligence grows as a team size increases and it flattens out between 10 and 11 people. It means that from a perspective of solving complex problems or accomplishing complex tasks the additional power we get by adding further team members compensates for the cost of more communication path and social interactions. It goes way beyond 5 people.

I often ask people during my presentations about an opinion whether individual intelligence and collective intelligence are connected. I always get vast majority of answers pointing that there is such connection, a discussion is only how strong it is. As you surely know the research didn’t prove it to be true. This is, by the way, a challenge of research based on opinions–the conclusions should be drawn very carefully.

By the way an interesting area to focus on would be what happens in big teams, e.g. bigger than 10 people. From my experience the team dynamics changes a lot. People tend to create sub-groups but often these sub-groups are created and disbanded dynamically depending on a situation. This at least partially addresses the challenge of too many social interactions and communication complexity. In other words at the same time a person can operate in a small group and a bigger entity. What would be the team size exactly in such a case?

Guest Posted on 4:29 am - February 4, 2016

The size of the group is not the only problem.
Another problem, for example, may be what is the optimal kind of experts that are to be engaged in a particular task.
Depending on what experts one chooses in the decision making process they may twist or distort the decision in one direction or another.
If you can manipulate, however the decision by the choice of the types of experts, what is the idea to letting them making the decision – why don’t you take personally the decision? … and it is not funny.