Читать книгу The Quality Improvement Challenge - Richard J. Banchs - Страница 60

In general, a QI project team should have four to eight members. A team of this size is better able to work through their “individual, functional, and hierarchical differences toward a common plan and hold themselves jointly accountable for the results” (Katzenbach 1993). When teams are either too small or too big, three things tend to happen:

1 Group thinking. A team that is too small may run into “group thinking” with lack of diversity in the team’s analytical and creative thinking.

2 Difficulty managing the team. A team that is too big may run into a number of problems, including scheduling, managing, and decision‐making.

3 The Ringelmann’s effect. Ringelmann’s famous study — often called the Ringelmann effect — analyzed people alone and in groups as they pulled on a rope. Ringelmann then measured the pull force and found that as he added more and more people to the rope, the total force generated by the group rose, but the average force exerted by each decreased. When teams are very large, team members tend to decrease the intensity of their work because they expect or assume other members will “pull their weight.”