Are two heads better than one? Let’s discuss more about groups—how they come together and operate, which elements need to be in place to ensure they are successful—but we’ve yet to talk about making choices between a group and an individual when it comes to particular tasks.

Managers are faced with these choices all the time. After reading all this, you may not understand how there can be a better choice than a cohesive, highly productive group to tackle any problem.

Let’s look at some comparisons.

Group vs. Individual Effort

In the late 1920s, Max Ringelmann, a German psychologist, set out to determine if individuals put forth the same level of effort in a group as they did when they were working alone. He set out to examine athletes engaged in a rope tug-o-war, and found that, in a one-on-one match, each player averaged an effort equal to 63 kilograms of force. In a group of three, that force dropped to 53 kilograms, and in a group of eight . . . only 31 kilograms of force.

This effect is referred to as social loafing, the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually. What causes it? Well, for one, there may be a perception that some group members are not putting out their fair share of effort, and so others are purposely pulling back on their own contribution. Or, it may be attributed to the fact that the entire group shares responsibility for an outcome, so no one person is held accountable for work that is (or is not) done.

It’s worth noting that social loafing isn’t common across all cultures—it actually has a western bias. It’s pretty consistent in individualistic cultures like the US and Canada, but collective societies, like China, do not exhibit as many social loafing tendencies.

If managers want to make sure that individual effort among their group doesn’t drop, they need to provide means by which individual contributions can be measured.

Decision Making

There are pros and cons when it comes to group decision making as well. The benefits of a decision made by a group are following. Decisions are:

• made with more complete information and knowledge.
• improved by considering diverse points of view.
• efficient with groups because they almost always outperform an individual.
• leads to a wider acceptance of a solution, because the decision is already supported by a group of people.

What are the weaknesses of group decision making? Well, an individual can make a decision instantly. When she does, she only has herself to convince that she is right. This short video captures the process for group decision making:

As you can see, they go through a review of information, preferences, and alternatives and they go around in circles until decision fatigue comes into play. Decision fatigue is defined as the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual or group as time progresses. With this group, the participants couldn’t come to a decision and so individuals in the group began throwing in the towel in a “whatever!” frame of mind. In a work environment, when a group reaches this state, poor decisions can be made.

In group decision making, decision fatigue can arrive over one decision that’s been drawn out and reviewed over and over without coming to a consensus. An individual tends to experience decision fatigue when faced with a lot of decisions—for example, a study of judges showed that they made better decisions earlier in the day, and the quality of their decisions diminished as the day went on.

Groupthink

A company called Despair, Inc. made a series of posters that poked fun at those black-framed motivation posters that companies began hanging in offices in the 1980s. Posters with lion faces touted the qualities of “excellence” and a set of colorful hot air balloons promoted ideas about “diversity.” In this company’s parody of those posters, one of their best sellers showed a bunch of faceless, suited humans throwing their hands into the middle of a huddle. The poster says, “Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us.”

No doubt the poster may be referring to Groupthink, which is a group decision-making phenomenon that prevents a group from making good decisions. Groupthink occurs when the group is so enamored with the idea of agreement that the desire for consensus overrides and stifles the proposal and evaluation of realistic alternatives.

To avoid Groupthink, managers can take the following steps to help their employers. Managers can:

• monitor the group size.
• play an impartial role.
• encourage a group member to challenge the opposite view of the group’s decision.
• discuss the negative consequences of the decision before talking about the positive aspects.

A manager’s role can help when a group is working on something that has high-level of risk for the organization. A subcategory of Groupthink is Groupshift. Groupshift is a phenomenon in which a group of people influence one another about the perception of risk. Group members tend to exaggerate their initial positions when presenting their ideas to the rest of the group. Sometimes, the group jumps in and pushes that decision to a conservative shift, but more often, the group tends to move toward the riskier option.

Why does this happen? It’s been argued that, as group members become more familiar with each other, they become more bold and daring. Another theory states that we admire individuals who aren’t afraid of risk, and those individuals who present risky alternatives are often admired by other members. Regardless, managers do well to remember that groups often shift toward riskier tendencies and can do their best to mitigate those results.

Introverts and Extraverts in Groups

It won’t come as much of a surprise to you to hear this: Introverts aren’t always delighted to work in groups.

People who consider themselves introverts operate internally and draw their strength from within. They like being around other people, but interacting with them requires an expenditure of energy. They don’t always feel comfortable or motivated to interact in groups, but they do often focus deeply on their work.

Conversely, extraverts love being around other people, they love participating in groups and gain energy by doing so. They’re nearly always motivated and comfortable interacting in a group.

Managers need to draw out the best of both types of members. In her 2015 article for Harvard Business Review, behavioral scientist Francesca Gino stated that it was the type of leader that had the most impact on these group members. Interestingly, extraverted managers could very easily draw responses out of introverts, but had a tendency to shut down extraverts who proposed new visions and ideas. Introverted managers had the advantage, as they carefully considered all responses and suggestions.

Gino’s group performed a study on a set of stores, and found that when extraverted managers were paired with a passive set of employees, they yielded higher sales. When those same extraverted managers were paired with an extraverted set of employees, their sales were lower than expected. But in both tests, introverted managers yielded higher sales.

Of her findings, Gino noted:

These results suggest that introverts can use their strengths to bring out the best in others. Yet introverts’ strengths are often locked up because of the way work is structured. Take meetings. In a culture where the typical meeting resembles a competition for loudest and most talkative, where the workspace is open and desks are practically touching, and where high levels of confidence, charisma, and sociability are the gold standard, introverts often feel they have to adjust who they are to “pass.” But they do so at a price, one that has ramifications for the company as well.

In managing a group, it pays for the manager to consider how meetings are set up and run. If you are thinking about becoming a manager, then taking the time to get to know your team’s strength will help them thrive as an individual and as a team. Arriving at a meeting process that encourages introverts to speak up and extraverts to take time for reflection is a win-win for the group and the company.