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Is it possible to have several smart individuals in a group, only to have them produce lousy ideas? The answer is yes! Can the collective intelligence of a group go beyond the abilities of individual group members? Again, the answer is yes. If a manager wants to contribute to a team’s performance, consider that teamwork does not come naturally.
In the rush to create highly functioning teams, it is easy to assign a number of individuals with diverse talents, goals and aspirations, and label that group a team. In reality, this action will not make a “team.” They may step on each other’s toes and create a non-friendly environment in which to work. Psychologists have repeatedly found that a single statistical factor known as “general intelligence” usually emerges from people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks (Woolley et al., 2010). Researchers studied 699 individuals working in groups of two to five people, and assigned them tasks like solving visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating limited resources. Researchers found that general intelligence far out-performed the average intelligence of individual participants (Woolley et al., 2010). Other factors that influenced general intelligence were the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking and the proportion of females in the group.
When creating “teams,” here are some helpful hints:
