there were 20 to 30 people in a team, but all knew their areas and the nature of the hardware and regulatory and industry standards were such that people could self organize and work away in mass parallel fashion just fine like that.

could be a case of fitting the problem domain really more than fitting human psychologies. early on there was one dude from India (brahmin) who kept complaining that he needed people to be reporting to him, rather than him being one of the workers, and that stuck out like a sore thumb, even with multiple brahmin indians in the group, and more americans, australians, brits, african etc...truly diverse by hiring for specialized talents.