Have you ever come across job postings boasting about a “friendly team” as if it were the ultimate benefit? It’s tempting to imagine that being surrounded by welcoming colleagues automatically boosts your mood and helps you get more done. However, social psychologists have discovered that teamwork doesn’t always guarantee higher productivity, and in some cases, it might even slow you down.

The Ringelmann Effect: Why More Doesn’t Always Mean Better

A classic illustration of how a group can underperform is known in psychology as the Ringelmann effect. When multiple individuals work on a shared task, there's a tendency for a diffusion of responsibility, leading to social loafing, where each person feels less personally accountable for the outcome and reduces their individual effort, assuming others will compensate. Bit by bit, each person eases off, convinced the rest of the group will handle the load. This can lead to a situation where the total group output is less than the sum of what each individual could achieve working alone. While the group may still produce more than one person, their combined effort is less efficient than their individual potential. Managers who truly understand this effect know they must assign responsibilities carefully, making each person accountable for specific outcomes. Otherwise, tasks get bounced around, some team members carry too much of the burden, and productivity hits a dead end.

Social Facilitation: Thriving Under Observation

While the Ringelmann effect warns us about group complacency, social facilitation highlights how certain tasks can actually benefit from extra eyes and ears nearby. For simple, well-learned tasks, the presence of co-actors (others performing the same task) or an audience can enhance performance. This is because the presence of others increases physiological arousal, which facilitates dominant responses (the most likely or habitual response). In simple tasks, the dominant response is usually the correct one. Psychologists discovered that people handling simple, repetitive tasks often perform better when they’re part of a collective or have supervisors watching. With straightforward work like assembling products or handling routine calculations, the presence of co-actors or an audience can enhance performance. Similar effects are observed in animals performing simple tasks in the presence of conspecifics (members of the same species) engaged in the same behavior. This demonstrates that the presence of others engaged in the same activity can increase individual exertion. It’s that competitive drive or awareness of being observed enhances performance on simple tasks.

Social Impairment: When an Audience Stifles Creativity

Here’s the twist. If your task involves high-level thinking, creativity, or problem-solving, being observed or evaluated can hinder performance. This phenomenon is known as social impairment, which describes the decline in performance on complex tasks when individuals are in the presence of others. Under these conditions, being observed can stir up stress or self-consciousness, causing your mind to clam up. Working on complex tasks—like writing, coding, or inventing something new—often requires a bit of solitude to let the creative juices flow. No wonder some professionals crave the freedom of remote work or prefer to slip away to a quiet spot to dive deep into their projects.

Balancing Productivity: A Practical Approach

So, how can we use these findings to our advantage? For simpler jobs, set up a shared space where everyone can see each other’s progress. That collective energy can boost performance on simple, well-learned tasks, especially when individual accountability is maintained to minimize social loafing. But if employees need to perform highly intellectual or artistic tasks, it’s better to give them privacy so social impairment doesn’t derail their focus. And don’t forget the Ringelmann effect, which teaches us that bigger teams aren’t always better teams—clear task assignments, personal responsibility, and meaningful feedback loops can keep everyone engaged. This might involve providing private workspaces for focused individual work and offering communal spaces for brainstorming, information sharing, and collaborative tasks that benefit from diverse perspectives. Sometimes that’s as simple as letting quiet geniuses do