You can no longer rely on personal relationships to dictate behaviors once a groups number exceeds ~150 members.
You can no longer rely on personal relationships to dictate behaviors once a groups number exceeds ~150 members. This seems to be correlated with the size of a particular structure in the brain of all primates. In humans, once a group gets above ~150 members, it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone and for the group to remain functional without rigid hierarchical rule sets. Peer pressure & expectations can govern for sufficiently small groups. This limit of 150 is called “Dunbar’s number”.
The manufacturing & technology company Gore-tex explicitly uses this number as the hard cap for how large each of their plants can get. Each factory has enough parking for 150 people. Once that number is exceeded they spin up a new factory, which is allowed to establish its own identity.
Implications
Companies crossing a threshold above 150 employees can no longer expect their employee base to generally know everyone.