Cooperation is one of those things that is generally regarded as a good thing in the workplace but that is not always easy to achieve. A recent study from the University of Chicago explores the costs and benefits of cooperation in terms of things like the division of labor and workload distribution.

The researchers explain that our individual contributions can often differ in a couple of ways, both of which play a role in our overall fitness. For instance, group members can differ in terms of their workload, ie the overall amount they do, or their specialization in particular tasks, ie their division of labor.

Unequal distribution

The researchers highlight how cooperative groups often contain a kind of mutualistic fitness benefits that are invoked by their collective action.

“Such a distinction between the collective action and offspring care frameworks is not productive, especially given that differences in individual contributions could be driven by the same factors—either by differences in individual-level costs and benefits of cooperation or by free-riding—in both cases,” the authors note.

They highlight that workload distribution is often studied in the context of collective action, but it’s important to understand how shared benefits can emerge from individual contributions.

“Rigorous work on individual contributions to cooperative tasks will expand our understanding of the causes and consequences of individual variation and the evolutionary stability of social living,” they conclude. “Such crosstalk might help to further our understanding of the factors that determine individual differences in the costs and benefits of cooperation and the contexts in which each factor is most relevant.”