Understanding the group dynamics and success of teams

TL;DR

This study analyzes large-scale data from around 150,000 online team projects to understand how team composition, focus, and experience influence success, revealing organizational principles for effective collaboration.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of team dynamics and success factors, highlighting the roles of focus, diversity, and experience in team performance.

Findings

Larger teams tend to be more successful.

Highly successful teams are more focused than average.

Members of successful teams have broader project experience.

Abstract

Complex problems often require coordinated group effort and can consume significant resources, yet our understanding of how teams form and succeed has been limited by a lack of large-scale, quantitative data. We analyze activity traces and success levels for ~150,000 self-organized, online team projects. While larger teams tend to be more successful, workload is highly focused across the team, with only a few members performing most work. We find that highly successful teams are significantly more focused than average teams of the same size, that their members have worked on more diverse sets of projects, and the members of highly successful teams are more likely to be core members or 'leads' of other teams. The relations between team success and size, focus and especially team experience cannot be explained by confounding factors such as team age, external contributions from non-team members, nor by group mechanisms such as social loafing. Taken together, these features point to organizational principles that may maximize the success of collaborative endeavors.