Harvard Business Review recently published an article about how having women on a team makes the team smarter. Although they didn’t find a correlation between the collective intelligence of the group and the IQ of individuals within that group, they did find that if women were in the group, the collective intelligence was higher.
The Female Factor: The chart plots the collective intelligence scores of the 192 teams in the study against the percentage of women those teams contained. The red bars indicate the range of scores in the group of teams at each level, and the blue circles, the average. Teams with more women tended to fall above the average; teams with more men tended to fall below it.
Professors Anita Wooley (Carnegie Mellon) and Thomas Malone (MIT) gave “subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.”
Finding the right mix of people on a team has been a consideration many organizations have dealt with in the past. These researchers hope to see how this information can help teams perform better in the future through changing members or incentives.
In the past, I taught teams how to get along better through the use of the Myers Briggs MBTI personality assessment instrument. Through understanding personalities, team members could learn about each other’s preferences for how they like to obtain information. This became more useful to the team as a whole. In my training experience, I found that even if a team had members with high IQ’s, they needed to understand why other members of the teams did the things they did and required the information they required in the format that fit their needs. It was important to understand the collective needs of the team in order for the team to be successful.
With the study by Wooley and Malone, they bring up the use of their findings in understanding collective intelligence. According to Malone, “Families, companies, and cities all have collective intelligence. But as face-to-face groups get bigger, they’re less able to take advantage of their members. That suggests size could diminish group intelligence. But we suspect that technology may allow a group to get smarter as it goes from 10 people to 50 to 500 or even 5,000. Google’s harvesting of knowledge, Wikipedia’s high-quality product with almost no centralized control—these are just the beginning. What we’re starting to ask is, How can you increase the collective intelligence of companies, or countries, or the whole world?”
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- It’s Not You It’s Your Personality: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Modern Workplace
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