Ringelmann Effect: Why You Want Smaller Teams To Succeed

More employees, worse work. The Ringelmann effect refers to the tendency of the individuals in a group to become progressively less effective as the size of the group increases. There is an inverse relationship between the amount of members in a group and the magnitude of each member’s contribution to the completion of a task. Performance and productivity decrease, both in physical and mental tasks. Ringelmann observed it on pulling a rope: when group members worked together, each member put in significantly less effort than when they acted alone.

The author of the effect with the same name discovered that, as more and more people are added to a group, the notion that group effort and participation reliably leads to increased effort is violated. The exact opposite happens. The process of social loafing takes place: we feel we can rely on co-members to exert themselves toward a communal task. Group members might even genuinely believe they are contributing at maximum potential. That is, we can be completely unaware of the Ringelmann effect.

But there are methods to stave off social loafing. Anything that makes the individual feel more responsible for their individual contributions works. Monitoring. Making them feel like an indispensable asset of the group. Setting unambiguous goals for each of them. Increasing their involvement. Make them part of it. Yet social loafing is not all that causes the Ringelmann effect. Sometimes humans just get confused. Uncoordinated. When there is a big group, each member carrying different talents, skills, effort, and strategies, and various interpersonal processes under the hood, it can be hard to coordinate our efforts in a productive way to one shared goal. Thus when a team isn’t able to synchronize, the team’s performance overall suffers.

If you are a manager, you have to worry about your team. Your team’s size in particular. Don’t go into expansionist, maximization mode. Else you might fall for the trap where each team member isn’t able to put forth their best work due to the sheer size of the team as a whole. Without guardrails for team member count, expansion increases output, decreases outcome. More workers at work, less work done-per worker. Personal performance becomes obscured and each of your reports isn’t as incentivized to maximize their contribution. Large groups kind of just suck. The strategy to take as a leader is to form teams just big enough to get the task done on time. Err on the side of caution. More might be less.

Real-life implications of the Ringelmann effect:

• Workplace: in many organizations, teams with more members experience a drop in individual productivity. For instance, a department often finds that as they add more employees, overall efficiency does not increase proportionately due to overlapping roles and reduced personal accountability;

• Classroom group projects: students working as part of large groups often contribute less individually, relying on the assumption that others will pick up the slack. This results in frustration among diligent members and inequal work distribution;

• Sports teams: in sports, coordination among many players can prove a challenge. A soccer team, for instance, has to carefully balance roles, otherwise the presence of too many players leads to confusion and a reduction of overall performance;

• Community: volunteer groups or community projects sometimes struggle with social loafing. When many are involved in an activity, some contribute minimally, believing that the collective effort will compensate for their lower involvement.

How you might employ the Ringelmann effect as a mental model: (1) enhance individual accountability, breaking teams into manageable units where individual contributions are visible; (2) foster clarity and communication, designating specific roles to people and centralizing collaboration among team members for everyone to both feel part of something bigger and as an essential asset of the machine; (3) set unambiguous, achievable individual goals and link them to incentives to make each member’s contribution seem valuable—rewarding both teamwork and individual initiative; (4) design for optimal group size, as bigger is typically worse, and a smaller team might be more effective for a balance of high individual effort and proper coordination.

The benefits of realizing and solving the Ringelmann effect are self-explanatory. Each individual does more. Overall group performance gets a boost. Groups form departments, which are part of organizations. Thus the entire organization carries through it a ripple effect of productivity when the Ringelmann effect is negated. No more free riders. Small, well-coordinated teams win. Big, confused, uncollaborative groups just cost us more and earn us less. Team size matters.