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Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
HughPickens.com writes Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn't score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group's success. Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.
Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated the these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as "Theory of Mind," to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."
Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated the these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as "Theory of Mind," to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."
intelligence. The study would not be publishable.
I think the genetic differences are overblown. Social differences are a much bigger factor, and either gender can easily learn the skills needed to be a good communicator and team player. Rather than being a gender issue, it sounds more like a training issue.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Instead of some simple tasks which anyone can do, if we throw in some tasks that could only be done by one or two persons in the team, then it would be more realistic. Something like some step needs derivative of a function and only one team member remembers calculus 101, or requires translating a passage from French to English.. The moment you introduce variation in skill sets among the team members, agile for software breaks down. This experiment too might have different results.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Teams are great for doing parallel repetetive tasks such as testing thousands of compounds to pharmacological activity or building a bridge or whacking out 10K lines of boiler plate code. But if you want inspiration or genius or a completely take on a problem then you're looking at individuals (even if they've stood on shoulders of giants). Einstein didn't think up Relativity in a scrum with powerpoint presentations (ok they weren't around then but you get the point), nor did Turing come up his theories on conference calls.
This will sound arrogant but I don't care - teams are great for the slightly dim and/or lazy people in the world because it means they don't have to put so much effort in or think too much. Hence why management tend to be so fond of them.