By and large, most companies want someone who will be a team player who can work well with others in collaborative tasks. While there are many cases where two (or more) heads are better than one, a
new study has found there are certain areas where dense collaborative clustering actually inhibits problem-solving.
The paper, "Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation
of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces," outlines how the researchers (three Massachusetts-based business professors) gathered groups of students to solve what was essentially a high-tech murder mystery using collaborative software used by the Department of Defense to train people in terrorism investigations. Teams of participants needed to determine, given a hypothetical terrorist attack, who would carry out the attack, what would be the target, where the attack would take place, and when it would happen. They had 25 minutes to solve the problem.
Some teams were densely clustered: every team member was linked to everyone else, while others were less so, with team members having links only to some others versus the entire team. What they found was that the more dense a cluster, the more efficient the team was at finding new information (as they avoided duplicative work) but these same dense teams were less effective at finding solutions. By contrast, more airy groups with fewer connections had a more difficult time gathering information, but produced more possible solutions to the problem.
The issue, according to the researchers, was that by being too connected, people were more likely to simply copy others than come up with unique solutions on their own, going along with an emergent group consensus.
Greater clustering, according to the paper, "
inhibits exploration by promoting the copying of neighbors’ answers... Both the checking and copying of neighbors’ theories indicate less extensive exploration of solution space, and we find that clustering at the individual level is associated with more checks of neighbors’ theories ... and more outright copying of their theories... Moreover, conditional on copying a neighbor’s theories at all, those in clustered positions were more likely to copy an incorrect
theory... whether
the person doing the copying originally had the correct answer, an incorrect answer, or no answer at all. At the collective level, the two clustered networks had significantly fewer unique theories registered in the aggregate than did the unclustered networks."
"In other words, it appears that whereas clustering increased exploration of information space, it inhibited exploration of solution space."
The results can hold deep implications for companies that work primarily with information-related tasks, according to the paper.
"For knowledge-intensive organizations, the implication is that connecting everybody with increasingly high-bandwidth communications technologies may improve coordination but reduce diversity in the knowledge created within the firm."