Studies show that in any collective activity, whether it is joint scientific work, team sports or office work, people often exaggerate their personal contribution. Often in this way they downplay the importance of what their comrades have done, which can lead to conflicts.
Juliana Schroeder, Associate Professor of Management at the School of Business. Haas University of California, Berkeley? decided to find out how the size of the team affects the propensity of members of this team to attribute most of the group’s achievements to themselves. To do this, she and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments.
The first experiment involved 699 MBA students taking a course in negotiation. Each of them was asked several questions regarding their activities in the study group, in particular, one of the questions was: “What do you think, what share of the overall work of the group did you personally do?” Some of the respondents were asked to first recall the name of each member of the group. Another part of the respondents was asked, in addition, to evaluate the approximate contribution of each of them to the common cause.
It turned out that the larger the size of the study group, the greater the share of the overall work the respondents attributed to themselves. This effect was especially pronounced if the group included more than eight people. However, if study participants were required to first remember their group mates, they were no longer as likely to exaggerate their personal accomplishments. This shows that it is likely that the participants were not consciously lying, but were simply too focused on their own efforts and forgot about what others were doing.
Participants assigned to groups of six were more likely to exaggerate their contribution to the overall outcome.
The second experiment involved volunteers from among the visitors of the Chicago Science and Industry Museum. They were divided into groups of three or six people who competed with each other in exercises with a carpal expander. The average results in each group were compared to determine the winner, and all members of the winning group received a small reward. Then the volunteers individually filled out questionnaires in which they assessed their personal contribution to the overall result of the group.
The results confirmed the findings of the first experiment – participants who were divided into groups of six were more likely to exaggerate their contribution to the overall result. If participants were also asked to rate the contributions of their group mates, they were generally more modest in their own assessments.
The study authors also conducted an online survey in which participants were asked to recall any situations in which they had the opportunity to perform some tasks in small (2-4 people) or larger (5-10 people) groups, and evaluate their own contribution to common cause. Again, the tendency to overestimate the importance of one’s own work was more pronounced when working in larger teams.
To reduce the impact of this trend, which can lead to conflicts and spoil relationships within the team, Juliana Schroeder recommends breaking large working groups into smaller ones and clearly allocating the responsibilities of each participant.