How big should your team be?

How do you know if you have the right number of people on your team? According to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the answer is all about food. Early in the e-commerce giant’s development, he’s reported to have said that if a team couldn’t be fed with two pizzas, it was simply too big.

A more nuanced answer might be that it really all depends on what you want that team to achieve.

A team of researchers recently concluded that within the science and technology industry, large teams tend to pick up the scientific consensus and develop it further, while smaller teams tend to challenge and disrupt.

They reached that conclusion by analyzing 65 million scientific reports and papers published between 1954 and 2014.

The researchers concluded that there is a valuable role for a range of team sizes, and that the scientific community benefits from both development and disruption. “Small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology and suggest that to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes,” they wrote in the journal Nature.

Will size matter?

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution continues to disrupt the employment landscape, ensuring teams of people are able to work effectively will be increasingly important. Change and disruption can cause a loss of focus as people worry about their job security or how their role might evolve.

Ensuring each team has the right mix of personalities and capabilities is going to become more important as people adjust to this new world of work.

Emotional intelligence and creativity have been identified as two of the top skills team members will need to possess, along with an attention to detail, resilience and flexibility.