Teams as technology: strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs in cognitive task performance

Purpose - This paper aims to assert that teams are a technology used to achieve task goals or social objectives that cannot be accomplished by individuals alone. Much current work in organizations is knowledge based, so it is important to know when to apply teams as a technology and how teams can be effectively utilized for cognitive task performance. This paper describes a number of strengths, weaknesses and trade-offs that accompany teams performing cognitive tasks. Design/methodology/approach - Research comparing team performance to that of similarly treated individuals indicates that teams on average exceed the performance of individuals on cognitive tasks; however, teams rarely match the performance of their best member. Findings - Based on analysis of this research, a set of strengths of teams are highlighted: information pooling, error correction, meta-knowledge, reliability and information sharing. Two weaknesses of team performance on cognitive tasks are also identified: slow to action and coordination losses. As a function of teams having these strengths and weaknesses, trade-offs in their task performance emerge: speed versus accuracy, convergence versus divergence, participation versus deindividuation, losses versus gains in motivation, social facilitation versus inhibition, accumulation versus coordination, focused versus distributed attention and accentuation versus attenuation of biases. Originality/value - These trade-offs demonstrate that teams operate in specific ways that sometimes benefit cognitive processing but will be hindered under other conditions. An understanding of those conditions is important when attempting to effectively use teams. So, technical knowledge rather than intuition is required to manage these processes appropriately and effectively.