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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 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."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @09:32AM
You know, what I have just read from multiple people in this forum sounds so ludicrous I would have never believed such things could possibly happen in a profit-centered business environment.
But I have to believe it. Similar stuff happened to me too in a company I worked at when a large investment company bought us.
I could not believe the misdirection of our resources happening under the direction of some high-up, highly paid, but had no idea how our stuff worked. My computer was deemed "dated" and sent to scrap, even though I had become quite proficient with it. Would they take an old violinist's instrument and trash it because they could buy a later cheaper one somewhere else? Seemed like a necktie was a tourniquet for the head on these folks, because their brain seemed offline.
If I were writing code for sale, I could see that, but I am an engineer and what I had was software that did integer math emulations for me to see how my statistics algorithms would perform in microcontrollers, and I had some simple schematic and PCB layout software so I could do fast-turns of PCB with the board house down the street for quick prototypes. With executive leadership, tasks that used to take days now took months, and often I spent so much time trying to re-learn some other way of doing things that the manager would approve that nothing got done at all.
The most critical people we had were the old guys that were the first to go. From what I could tell, they were not very good ass-kissers to those they did not respect, and barging in dressed in power suit and tie did little to impress them. These old coots were the guys all us younger ones went to when things went sour - they had probably seen something similar and would tell us their take on it, which often made the difference between a few days work and something we could ponder months and lots of failed trys on and still not get it. A lot of those guys were past retirement age anyway, but they hung on for the fun of it - and working with the suit-guys must have been just as much as a pain in the ass to them as it was to me.
Now I am back working with a very small company. The pay is lousy, but the work is fun. So it means I am getting quite good at dumpster diving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @12:32PM
"You know, what I have just read from multiple people in this forum sounds so ludicrous I would have never believed such things could possibly happen in a profit-centered business environment.
But I have to believe it. Similar stuff happened to me too in a company I worked at when a large investment company bought us. "
I got a crazier story. I know a security guard that used to be a field manager for a relatively new firm at the time. Very bright person. He worked there for a number of years and was asking to become an account manager. The owner told him he would hire him as an account manager when a position is available. As the company grew and expanded and succeeded the owner decided it was time to start hiring new account managers. But the owner didn't consider him for the position (I guess he wanted to keep him as a field manager). Instead the owner hired a bunch of x-military people with no security or field manager or any sort of relevant experience that were credentialed and applied to become cops and were turned down by various police departments for whatever reason. Basically a bunch of deadbeat wannabe cops that no one would hire. This field manager was very upset and quit. A year later this company declared bankruptcy because it was inundated with sexual harassment suits from the account managers harassing their security guards.