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posted by LaminatorX on Monday January 19 2015, @03:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the ME-in-team dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 19 2015, @01:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 19 2015, @01:08PM (#136024)

    A lot of bad managers work that way: forbid you from doing the obvious sensible necessary thing, and then fire you for doing them anyway.

    I don't think you guys understand how this works. Lets say you want to fire a guy for parking in your parking space, being black, a woman, a Jew, or even "worse" all of the above at the same time. Post 1960 or so, you don't write on the termination papers for HR under reason for firing "known to go to Synagogue on Saturdays". You make the job legally, carefully, totally impossible, then fire them for lack of productivity if they don't do the impossible or fire them for insubordination if they provide any feedback about the dumb idea other than the purest of brown nosing. As a bonus that might deny them unemployment benefits or might make them leave out of hatred.

    Its not even necessarily illegal discrimination or arbitrary non-professional personal reasons. Maybe he just doesn't like your coding style or you wrote a bug that he really didn't like, but he got overruled by his boss or HR when he tried to fire you for his idea of a valid cause, so its time to go all underhanded to dispose of you. Also see stealth downsizing. If you need to downsize without starting a stampede to the door, just turn the workplace into a dilbertian hellhole and neglect to replacement hire as people leave, maybe ease back on the BS once salary drops below the new lower budget, etc.

    The funny part is some of these management guys are total dinosaurs and don't understand that in 2015 people talk online, so banning version control or emacs or unit testing or whatever is going to have a spectacular negative public impact, which can kill a company. That's how you did stuff in the 90s, so managers stuck in '95 but working in '15 tend to make really stupid managerial decisions.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @03:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @03:09PM (#136046)

    That's how you did stuff in the 90s,
    Even in 95 we used version control. Anyone who didnt quickly found out why it was a bad idea not to even have some sort of system/process or the real deal.

    Do not mistake poor decisions for 'that is the way they did it'. They were poor decisions then and they still are.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday January 19 2015, @03:44PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday January 19 2015, @03:44PM (#136057)

    That certainly can be one part of the story. If management is trying to get rid of their subordinates, and giving you an impossible task is certainly a warning sign, then yes, you're completely right.

    But there's another common management pathology, especially at startups, that goes like this: Companies like Apple (and it's nearly always Apple in their brains, because these guys always think they're the next Steve Jobs) succeeded because they did things completely different from the established wisdom in the field. Ergo, when my subordinates (who must not know better than me, otherwise they'd be the boss) present the established wisdom, I need to "lead" by defying that wisdom and demand they do something completely different.

    This of course ignores how most successful companies get there: Do what others are trying to do, but be better at it.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.