Team performance: should ideas be generated before they are discussed?

Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ « Performance d'équipe » programme, one question deserves examination: to obtain more possible solutions, should a team start with collective discussion or individual work? In Berne, this methodological choice applies equally to improving an administrative process and to finding solutions in public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing.

What the literature establishes

Brian Mullen, Craig Johnson and Eduardo Salas (1991, Basic and Applied Social Psychology) synthesised research comparing interactive brainstorming with so-called nominal groups, whose members generate ideas separately before these are pooled. Their meta-analysis identifies a productivity loss in interactive groups on the measures of idea quantity and quality examined. The relevant comparison is therefore not between a team and one person working alone, but between different ways of organising contributions from the same number of people.

The mechanism: waiting to speak also blocks production

Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe (1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) experimentally investigated several explanations for this productivity loss. Their findings assign a major role to production blocking: when people must wait to speak, expressing ideas becomes a bottleneck. A lively, participative session can therefore remain less productive than parallel work without participants lacking motivation.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that collective discussion should be removed from the search for solutions. These studies do not support such a broad conclusion: generating proposals, evaluating them and deciding on implementation are different tasks. Starting with individual idea generation is an approach consistent with these findings, not a guarantee that every sequence of working alone and then together will improve final performance. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the measures do not tell us

The findings concern idea-generation tasks and the criteria used in the studies, not the entirety of a team’s work. A proposal judged original may still be unusable under legal requirements, health standards or industrial constraints. Counting ideas without examining their feasibility would therefore shift the problem rather than measure operational progress.

A practical check in Berne

In a Berne-based team in the federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing, compare two formats of equal total duration across several comparable problems: oral discussion from the outset, or silent individual writing followed by pooling. Alternate their order and retain the same rules for framing the problem and selecting proposals. Measure the number of distinct proposals judged actionable against predefined criteria by assessors who do not know which format was used. This local test can inform SHR’s « Performance d'équipe » programme without being presented as general proof of superiority. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Team Performance in Bern

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