Try this experiment: Ask each member of a team who has just achieved a milestone what was their contribution to that achievement, in percentage. Ask them independently. Then add those percentages up. You would expect to get 100 percent, right? In reality, you are likely to get more than 100 percent. Sometimes much more.
Why does that happen?
UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Juliana Schroeder blames it on egocentrism. People tend to focus and know their own contributions much clearer than the contributions of others in the team. They don’t do that because of arrogance, but simply because they are much more aware of what they are doing than what everyone else on the team is doing.
As a result, when you add those percentages up, the sum of all contributions appears to be greater than 100 percent. Even more than that–the more members are in the team, the higher the total becomes. And she can prove it.
Schroeder conducted three experiments using MBA students who were asked to report on their contribution to a team project. She found that adding the individual self-reports exceeded 100 percent, and in a group of eight participants, it even reached 140 percent.
Why is that a problem?
Imagine what you would feel if you worked every day from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. to meet a deadline, work weekends, and see that other members of the team show up to work at 9 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. sharp. Effective teamwork requires trust, and trust requires fairness. If you believe that you pull more that your fair share of the load for the team, you will not feel that the team is fair, and that will slow the development of trust, if not stall it altogether.
What can you do about it?
All is not lost. Schroeder claims that when you ask team members to estimate their contribution, ask them to first estimate the contribution of others. Once they do that, they will have harder time to report a higher contribution for themselves. She further claims that even if they report their own contribution first, but know they will have to estimate the contribution of the others later, they will still reduce the estimate of their own contribution. Finally, she adds, even if all they have to do is list all other team members without estimating their contributions, they will likely be more conservative in estimating their own contribution.