It’s often said that for a team to perform well, everyone should have an equal voice. Yet a recent study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior by Wu, Tangirala, van Knippenberg, and Shu shows that this idea needs some nuance. The authors examined how teams, over time, tend to centralize conversations around certain members—and how this dynamic affects performance.
To conduct their research, they tracked 175 management student teams over eight weeks, collecting repeated data on each member’s speaking frequency, perceived competence, and the teams’ final performance. They also factored in collective personality traits, such as conscientiousness and openness to experience.
The results show that, at the beginning, teams generally function in a fairly egalitarian way, with members speaking up in balanced proportions. Over time, however, centralization sets in: some people gradually take up more space in discussions. This shift can be beneficial, but only if those who become central are in fact the most competent. In teams where centralization revolved around the most skilled members, performance improved significantly. On the other hand, when dominance came from the most talkative—but not necessarily the most capable—members, centralization had a negative effect.
Another interesting aspect concerns teams’ average personality traits. The researchers found that teams with more conscientious members were quicker to identify and highlight the competent ones. In teams characterized by greater openness, this dynamic also occurred, but more slowly.
This study offers useful insights for team management. It shows that collective performance doesn’t rest solely on an equal distribution of speaking time, but on a group’s ability to recognize real expertise and give more weight to those who bring the strongest contribution. That doesn’t mean discouraging participation from others, but rather that a mature team learns to make space for those who can decisively move it forward.