How can managers best design teams and tasks?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 7, 2026 — Current research on teambuilding often focuses on individuals or teams working on just one or a few tasks, making it difficult for managers to gain a solid understanding of how to put together the most effective teams or whether to assign individual work when a variety of very different tasks are involved.

“The Task Space: An Integrated Framework for Team Research,” published in Management Science, offers a new approach to analyzing how well teams perform on a wide variety of tasks in an effort to better characterize the connection between types of tasks and the ability of teams and individuals to perform them. Authors are MIT Sloan School of Management associate professor Abdullah Almaatouq; postdoctoral associate and lead author Xinlan Emily Hu from the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; Linnea Gandhi from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and Mark E. Whiting and Duncan J. Watts of the University of Pennsylvania.

How can this research better inform managers’ decisions?

The paper introduces the Task Space, a multidimensional, and organizational design tool that creates a task map of 102 crowd-annotated tasks from the published experimental literature. The researchers conducted an experiment sampling 20 diverse tasks from the Task Map at three complexity levels, recruiting 1,231 participants to work either individually or in groups of three or six for a total of 180 experimental conditions.

The Task Space is publicly available for use by researchers and managers interested in applying the tool to analyze and allocate tasks in their own settings.

The researchers noted that when tasks involve more creative output or more open-ended expectations individuals tended to outperform teams. Though teams scored lower on these tasks during the experiment, the authors stressed  that there might be other benefits of this type of work for teams, such as learning and rapport-building. When efficiency is the main objective, however, the best performance was achieved when a team could focus all of their efforts toward a clear, definitive output.

“If a manager wants to know how a team will perform on their particular task, they shouldn't assume a finding from one task transfers to another just because the tasks seem similar. Instead, they can adapt our approach to create a map and populate it with the relevant tasks in their organization,” said Almaatouq. “We explain how to construct the map, the method for navigating it, and a demonstration of the value of doing so, rather than a fixed set of answers.”

Why does the type of task matter?

The researchers found that one of the most important factors affecting team performance is the task itself. For example, groups either performed much worse or meaningfully better than the best individual working alone, depending on the task features. The details and nature of the task account for around 40-43% of the variance in the outcome. In particular, teams tended to outperform individuals on more structured tasks — meaning tasks that have a well-defined outcome.

“When managers think about designing a team, especially if efficiency is a top priority, designing the task is very important,” said Hu. “Teams consistently perform best when the task has a very clear deliverable of what the team is expected to do and a benchmark for how they are meant to perform.”

About the MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu.