Women Increase Team Intelligence
Looking for a way to get more from your virtual or traditional team? A new Harvard Business study found a simple way to increase the collective intelligence of a team— add more women. The study gave teams of subjects, aged 18 to 60, standard intelligence tests and then scored teams based on performance. Conventional factors such as group cohesion, group motivation and intelligence were not highly correlated with success. However, preliminary findings indicate that not only is it good to have women in a group, but the more the better.
As expected, it’s not quite that simple. There is evidence that results may decline in groups of all women, that some gender diversity is positive. The result may also be at least partially explained by differences in social sensitivity, a trait that can be found in both men and women. However, the results are valuable in further understanding team performance and how to improve the collective intelligence of a team, giving data to observed findings that diversity contributes to group success.
The next step may be determining the best group size, a question pondered by researches and theorist alike. As face-to-face groups get bigger, they’re less able to take advantage of their members but what is the ideal size of a virtual group? Does technology guarantee a group gets smarter as it goes from 10 people to 50 to 500 or even 5,000? Many proponents of crowdsourcing projects are quick to point out that organizations do not need to worry about sacrificing quality for quantity. Others point out that group size may depend on the goal of the project. Quantity is good for creating ideas and quality is good for setting a vision, for example.
What do you think— what factors contribute to the smartest team? The most collaborative team? Are different groups best for different types of projects?
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