The Ringelmann effect is attributed to the 1913 work of French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann: in collective tasks such as rope pulling, average performance per person can drop as the group grows. The effect was also examined in a 1974 study by Ingham and colleagues.
There is no need to explain this as laziness; its business equivalent is that individual ownership blurs as responsibility is shared. This is Eidos’s interpretation.
What happens daily between marketing and sales departments is exactly this.
The root cause of revenue loss: dispersed ownership
The split usually gets diagnosed as a communication problem, as though more frequent meetings and a shared dashboard would solve it. But the problem is not in the flow of information; it lies in ownership.
Both teams may be hitting their own targets: marketing reached its monthly record count, sales closed the expected share of what it received. Both look successful on their own metric, while at the handover between them no name is attached to anything. Revenue disappears in exactly that gray area.
Where responsibility dissolves: the handover point
When a lead moves from marketing to sales, a crisis is unavoidable if the following are not committed to a written protocol.
| Process question | What happens without an answer | Operational risk |
|---|---|---|
| When does a record count as ready? | Each team stretches its own definition of qualified | Conflicting definitions |
| Within how many hours is contact made? | Sales defers the record to its own priority order | Loss of buyer interest |
| What happens to an unreachable record? | It is forgotten in the system without follow-up | Database clutter |
| Does a rejected record come back? | Marketing never puts it into nurture | Lost opportunity |
Without clear answers, marketing says I sent it, my part is done, and sales says the records were poor. Both are right within their own frame. Two people are pulling the rope and both are pulling slightly less hard.
Three practical rules
In group work, per-person contribution can drop more easily when individual contribution is not visible. When contribution and responsibility become visible, this tendency is expected to shrink; this is an Eidos inference, not a direct result of Ringelmann’s experiment.
In closing: the ownership test
We lose ground not because teams work badly, but because responsibility disperses. Dispersed responsibility requires no bad intent; a lack of clarity is enough.
To find out whether a target truly has an owner, ask one question: when this target is missed, who alone will explain it? If the answer is all of us, then nobody owns it.