Nowadays, almost every important decision is made by a group, from a board of directors setting policy for a major corporation to employees drafting a business presentation.
But what makes a group effective? The answer might come down to gender.
A team of professors from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Union College have published research suggesting that just as some people are smarter than others, some groups are smarter than others. There is a “c factor’’ for collective intelligence that isn’t strongly correlated with members’ intelligence but, rather, with the number of females in the group.
The first of the studies grouped 697 participates into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of tasks, which were selected to represent different kinds of problems in a real-world environment. Tasks included logical analysis, brainstorming and planning.
The researchers gave each participant an I.Q. test, but surprisingly teams with higher I.Q.s didn’t perform better than teams with lower I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people or teams with more motivated participants.
Instead, the smarter teams shared three characteristics. First, the members contributed more equally to the team’s discussion, rather than few people dominating the group. Second, the members scored higher on a test that measures how well people read someone’s mind just through their face. Last, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men, something that was partly explained by the fact that women were better at mindreading than men.
More recently, researchers conducted a similar, follow-up study that divided the teams into two categories, those that worked face-to-face and those that worked online using Skype, email and other remote means. Notably, the smarter teams had the same characteristics as the smarter teams in the other studies.
The studies were performed by Anita Woolley, a professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and Christopher Chabris, a professor of psychology at Union College. The first was published in 2010. The second was published in December.
At a time when many argue that the Internet can destroy interpersonal skills and ruin emotional intelligence, these studies suggest that isn’t the case. Sensitive people can read a person’s emotions when face-to-face and through text messages.
And if women are able to do that more effectively than men, that could become more justification for closing the male-female wage gap.
