Ea Structure

Electronic Arts’ performance in the market has been constantly challenged over the past years. This lead to the company cutting costs and laying off workers as in effort to turn their situation around. However, poor economic performance of the company may reside in various corners of the company’s structure. Electronic Arts operates in an industry, which heavily relies on teamwork and well-functioning teams are crucial for the company’s success. The company’s biggest challenge is managing large teams, which constantly increase as the game industry expands (Pausch, 2004). Malfunctioning teams put extra challenges on project development and delivery, causing revenue loss to the whole company. Team functioning is challenged in several ways in Electronic Arts, for instance through team size and its constant growth, and team management.
Team size at EA has been constantly growing. The size may range from 20 to 250 people during the game development process. Teams at EA are mainly cross-functional teams, where people from different areas of game design work together on a specific game title. (Pausch, 2004). Overly big teams lead to decrease in team cohesiveness and increased social loafing ( Langton, 2009). Group cohesiveness is positively correlated with team productivity, and since increase in team size leads to drop in cohesiveness, we can expect reduced team productivity throughout Electronic Arts. At the same time, increased social loafing, tendency for individuals to put less effort when working collectively, decreases individual productivity (Langton, 2009). Hence, increased team size has negative effect on team productivity; in turn, team’s effort to overcome this challenge will heavily be delegated to manager’s duty, which brings us to the next challenges for the teams at EA.
EA does not have a single standard team structure, thus each title is being run as a small company by its Executive Producer (EP), who is in charge of the whole project and reports