Silence is golden: team problem solving and communication costs
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Silence is golden: team problem solving and communication costs Gary Charness1 · David J. Cooper2,3 · Zachary Grossman2 Received: 6 February 2018 / Revised: 1 October 2019 / Accepted: 9 October 2019 © Economic Science Association 2019
Abstract We conduct experiments comparing the performance of individuals and teams of four subjects in solving two rather different tasks. The first involves nonograms, logic puzzles that require a series of incremental steps to solve. The second task uses CRT-type questions, which require a single, specific insight. Contrary to the existing literature, team performance in both tasks is statistically indistinguishable from that of individuals when communication is costless. If a tiny message cost is imposed, team performance improves and becomes statistically better than that of individuals, although still worse than previous research on teams would have suggested. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to find that imposing friction on communication leads to more effective performance in teams. Message costs reduce the quantity of messages but increase the quality, specifically the mix of good and bad suggestions. The improved quality of communication with message costs allows teams to out-perform individuals. Our analysis suggests that organizations would do better by identifying an able individual to perform an intellective task rather than using teams; prediction exercises indicate that this will not harm, and will generally increase, performance relative to a team, and only requires the cost of paying one individual rather than many. Keywords Communication · Inexpensive talk · Team performance · Puzzles · Experiment JEL Classification C91 · C92 · D03 · D20 “Silence is golden …” —The Four Seasons
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 3-019-09627-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * David J. Cooper [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction Suppose you are a manager facing a difficult problem. You can try to find a solution yourself or you can put together a team to help you. It would seem obvious that you would do better with the help of a team. While there are costs associated with having a team (salaries and opportunity costs), you gain the benefits of others’ insights. Interactions among teammates might even lead to synergies and further insights that would not occur to individuals, since diverse ideas can be complementary and build upon each other. Indeed, there is a great deal of research that supports the notion that teams are better than individuals at solving intellective problems. However, anyone who has ever worked on a group project may be less convinced about the effectiveness of teams or the value of communication from co-workers. Not all shared insights are good insights, and it takes time to separate good ideas from bad ones. We conduct
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