Effectiveness Vs Communication Load
As the above graph demonstrates, there is a practical limit on team size before the communications load required to keep team members in synchronisation begins to significantly reduce individual team members performance. The usual method for combating this trend is to partition large teams up into smaller teams to reduce the communication overhead per individual.
Source ‘Agile Software Development’ by Alistair Cockburn page 160.
[...] be a disadvantage. Working within a small team of developers does not usually have enough of a communication overhead to sufficiently prepare a student for the experience of working in a large team. The higher the [...]