Intermittent Collaboration Leads to Best Collective Performance

New research by Harvard Business School associate professor Ethan Bernstein and colleagues, to be published online next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), suggests that “always on” may not be always effective. “Intermittently on” might, instead, be better for complex problem solving.

In their study the three researchers–Bernstein, Assistant Professor Jesse Shore from the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, and Professor David Lazer from Northeastern University–put together and studied the results of a number of three-person groups performing a complex problem-solving task. The members of one set of groups never interacted with each other, solving the problem in complete isolation; members of another set of groups constantly interacted with each other, as we do when equipped with always-on technologies; and a third set of groups interacted only intermittently.

From prior research, the researchers anticipated that the groups in which members never interacted would be the most creative, coming up with the largest number of unique solutions–including some of the best and some of the worst–representing a high level of variation that sprang from their working alone. In short, they expected the isolated individuals to produce a few fantastic solutions but have, as a group, a low average quality of solution (due to the variation). That proved to be the case.

The researchers also anticipated that the groups that constantly interacted would produce a higher average quality of solution, but that they would fail to find the very best solutions as often. In short, they expected the constantly interacting groups to be less variable but at the cost of their best solutions being more mediocre. That proved to be the case as well.

Source: Collaborate, but only intermittently, says new study