MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 074 / CONTROL

MAKE THE TEAM BIGGER

If a team is struggling, add enough people to guarantee that expertise is no longer the limiting factor.

Expand membership whenever additional knowledge might help. Preserve the same meetings, communication channels and decision process. Any coordination difficulty can be solved by ensuring all relevant people are included in the next coordination meeting.

Primary: CONTROLBELONGINGPOWER
RATIONALE
Larger teams increase available human capital and make exclusion harder to explain.
SUCCESS INDICATOR
Every decision has enough stakeholders to require a second meeting about how the first meeting will make the decision.
COMMON FAILURE
Sizing teams to the task and recognizing that additional human capital can be offset by coordination and process losses depending on task complexity and interdependence.
STATUS
Canonical / approved

Reconstructed Handbook series.

THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Unfortunately, the research…

Claim

Team size has no universal positive or negative effect on performance. Meta-analytic evidence shows large contextual variation, with benefits from added human capital in some tasks and process losses where coordination demands dominate.

Evidence

A meta-analysis of more than 21,000 teams found the average relationship between team size and task performance was essentially zero but highly variable; task complexity and coordination requirements helped explain when larger teams helped or hurt.

Strength: Strong

Sources

The Directive is satire. The research summary is not. Evidence is stated separately and qualified to the underlying literature rather than treated as proof of the joke.

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