While I was traveling this week, I read Richard Farson's Management of the Absurd. Farson is a psychologist by trade and many of the insights in this, his earlier book, are derived straight from his earlier psychology results. There were several that caught my eye and I thought I'd blog this one first.

In flat structures with highly empowered, self-organizing teams (Farson calls these highly participative teams) the team members will tend to attack and weed out the strongest (or stronger) member(s), often the leader. In hierarchical structures, with command and control structures, the members will tend to attack and weed out the weaker members.

This result has tremendous implications for team assignment and resource allocation for agile managers. It essentially says that agile teams (or work groups) should be selected for a very similar skill level. For example, if you are a manager with 24 staff - 4 of whom are stars, 4 are weak players and the rest are good solid journeymen engineers - and you have to get 6 projects done, then you should group all the good people in to a single team and all the bad people in to a single team. The natural inclination is to spread the good people across the projects and spread the bad people across the projects. However, Farson's result suggests that this will lead to dysfunction on the team and a likelihood that the team will pick on, single out and attack the strongest member. Definitely not a behavior we want to encourage on agile teams in a high trust environment.Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Faron+Richard, Management, Organization+Team, Psychology