Stan Pickens, Strasz Project Manager
October 1, 2014
Group brainstorming is ubiquitous in today’s business world. And it’s natural to assume that the diversity of group members ultimately enriches the group’s development of ideas. But is there any truth to the assumption? Does a group create more ideas than individual workers or nominal groups? This blog post investigates these questions.
To the person on the street, a group seems better for generating ideas than an individual. After all, group members bring different perspectives and backgrounds to the table, so it’s natural to assume that this diversity enriches the group’s production of ideas. But is there any truth to the assumption? Does a group generate more ideas than a nominal group (see sidebar, right) or an individual?
Research is beginning to put the person-on-the-street’s assumption to the test; for example, a recent journal article (Jones and Lambertus, 2014)3 examines group versus individual idea productivity. The authors first cite a body of research pointing to lower idea productivity for groups versus nominal groups. Much of this research sought to explain this outcome as the result of faulty group dynamics, namely:
- Production blocking: When a group member loses their idea while waiting for a chance to speak.
- Evaluation apprehension: When a group member fears a negative reaction from others.
- Social matching: When a group member decreases their contribution to the group, in order to match the decreased contribution of others in the group.
Jones and Lambertus then examine decreased expectation of group productivity as an explanation for the productivity drop. In other words, the group members themselves expect their group to produce fewer ideas as the size of the group increases. In an experiment with 78 participants, the authors showed a negative correlation of group size with the number of ideas generated by the group (–0.39), and the probability of a chance correlation as less than 0.001 (N = 78, r = –0.39, p < 0.001).
While the study shows that reduced expectation can explain the lower productivity of groups, Jones and Lambertus did not examine underlying process factors. In this author’s view, the limiting process factor is the time needed to create a shared understanding of an idea among the group’s members. Very often this is a tortuous process, as group members digress and follow tangents in their search for understanding. When the development of shared understanding becomes stymied, group members are likely to engage in sacrificing (considering a more limited set of options and choosing one that is “good enough”), a frustrating outcome common to groups.
A possible factor that underlies both decreased expectations and faulty process dynamics is the dramatic increase in the number of intercommunication pathways with increased group size. Each member of a group has a communication pathway to every other member. So, any given group has the following number of intercommunication pathways:
n * (n – 1) / 2
For example, a two-member group has only one connection pathway:
2 * (2 – 1) / 2 = 1
A four-member group increases the number of intercommunication pathways from one to six:
4 * (4 – 1) / 2 = 6
A ten-member group has 45 pathways.
10 * (10 – 1) / 2 = 45
In short, increasing group size increases the number of pathways, which increases the difficulty of creating a shared understanding. Thus, more intercommunication pathways might invite more faulty process dynamics, more sacrificing, and reduced expectations of the group.
Decreased expectation of group performance is not mutually exclusive with the dynamics of production blocking, evaluation apprehension, and social matching. Jones and Lambertus cite interesting research on the mediating effect of electronic collaboration on production blocking (Gullupe, Bastianutti, and Cooper, 1991)2 and other research that suggests that large groups collaborating electronically can outperform nominal groups (DeRosa, Smith, and Hantula, 2007).1
CITATIONS:
1. DeRosa, D. M., Smith, C. L., and Hantula, D. A. (2007). The medium matters: Mining the long-promised merit of group interaction in creative idea generation tasks in a meta-analysis of the electronic group brainstorming literature. Computers in Human Behavior, 1549–1581.
2. Gallupe, R. B., Bastianutti, L. M., and Cooper, W. H. (1991). Unblocking brainstorms. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77–86.
3. Jones, E. E., and Lambertus, J. D. (2014). Expecting Less From Groups: A New Perspective on Shortcomings in Idea Generation Groups. Groups Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 237–250.
Lisa Everts, Test Developer, Business Development
August 17, 2018
Associations want to offer certification and learning opportunities to their members, and often that leaves their staff to manually coordinate information across different software systems by exporting information from one system and importing it into another, or even manually re-entering the information. This can add to the staff’s volume of work, and create room for errors or lost transactions. The author of this blog post offers a convenient solution…APIs!
To the person on the street, a group seems better for generating ideas than an individual. After all, group members bring different perspectives and backgrounds to the table, so it’s natural to assume that this diversity enriches the group’s production of ideas. But is there any truth to the assumption? Does a group generate more ideas than a nominal group (see below) or an individual?
Research is beginning to put the person-on-the-street’s assumption to the test; for example, a recent journal article (Jones and Lambertus, 2014)3 examines group versus individual idea productivity. The authors first cite a body of research pointing to lower idea productivity for groups versus nominal groups. Much of this research sought to explain this outcome as the result of faulty group dynamics, namely:
- Production blocking: When a group member loses their idea while waiting for a chance to speak.
- Evaluation apprehension: When a group member fears a negative reaction from others.
- Social matching: When a group member decreases their contribution to the group, in order to match the decreased contribution of others in the group.
Jones and Lambertus then examine decreased expectation of group productivity as an explanation for the productivity drop. In other words, the group members themselves expect their group to produce fewer ideas as the size of the group increases. In an experiment with 78 participants, the authors showed a negative correlation of group size with the number of ideas generated by the group (–0.39), and the probability of a chance correlation as less than 0.001 (N = 78, r = –0.39, p < 0.001).
While the study shows that reduced expectation can explain the lower productivity of groups, Jones and Lambertus did not examine underlying process factors. In this author’s view, the limiting process factor is the time needed to create a shared understanding of an idea among the group’s members. Very often this is a tortuous process, as group members digress and follow tangents in their search for understanding. When the development of shared understanding becomes stymied, group members are likely to engage in sacrificing (considering a more limited set of options and choosing one that is “good enough”), a frustrating outcome common to groups.
A possible factor that underlies both decreased expectations and faulty process dynamics is the dramatic increase in the number of intercommunication pathways with increased group size. Each member of a group has a communication pathway to every other member. So, any given group has the following number of intercommunication pathways:
n * (n – 1) / 2
For example, a two-member group has only one connection pathway:
2 * (2 – 1) / 2 = 1
A four-member group increases the number of intercommunication pathways from one to six:
4 * (4 – 1) / 2 = 6
A ten-member group has 45 pathways.
10 * (10 – 1) / 2 = 45
In short, increasing group size increases the number of pathways, which increases the difficulty of creating a shared understanding. Thus, more intercommunication pathways might invite more faulty process dynamics, more sacrificing, and reduced expectations of the group.
Decreased expectation of group performance is not mutually exclusive with the dynamics of production blocking, evaluation apprehension, and social matching. Jones and Lambertus cite interesting research on the mediating effect of electronic collaboration on production blocking (Gullupe, Bastianutti, and Cooper, 1991)2 and other research that suggests that large groups collaborating electronically can outperform nominal groups (DeRosa, Smith, and Hantula, 2007).1
CITATIONS:
1. DeRosa, D. M., Smith, C. L., and Hantula, D. A. (2007). The medium matters: Mining the long-promised merit of group interaction in creative idea generation tasks in a meta-analysis of the electronic group brainstorming literature. Computers in Human Behavior, 1549–1581.
2. Gallupe, R. B., Bastianutti, L. M., and Cooper, W. H. (1991). Unblocking brainstorms. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77–86.
3. Jones, E. E., and Lambertus, J. D. (2014). Expecting Less From Groups: A New Perspective on Shortcomings in Idea Generation Groups. Groups Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 237–250.