Group IQ & Employee Engagement
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jan 10, 2011
Carolyn Y. Johnson summarizes a series of studies researching what makes up the collective intelligence of a team in her recent Boston Globe article “Group IQ”. These have some interesting ramifications for us as researchers into employee satisfaction and engagement.
Group IQ is not…
- …a function of the average IQ of members of the group.
- …a function of the IQ of the most intelligent member.
- …related to the group’s motivation, its unity or—horrors!—the satisfaction of its members.
- …increased by a domineering leader.
Group IQ is enhanced…
- …when members are good at reading one another’s emotions.
- …when members take turns speaking.
- …when the group has a greater the proportion of women than other groups do.
Luis Nunes Amaral, a professor at Northwestern University, analyzed 113 years of Broadway musicals and discovered that maintaining a stable set of group members was actually a detriment. Groups with new members made new connections and had greater creativity and success.
As Carolyn concluded:
Instead of seeing groups as nameless and faceless affiliations that swallow up an individual’s identity, the new work on collective behavior suggests that in company lies opportunity. The field of intelligence testing has long been controversial, in part because of concerns that such scores were crude and biased, pigeon-holing people as stupid or smart. In contrast, collective intelligence offers a new spectrum of possibilities. Instead of pronouncing a person’s intellectual engine good or bad, the research suggests that group intelligence is highly malleable and that concrete steps — such as mixing newcomers into an established team or not allowing a single leader to dominate — could fundamentally alter the group’s intelligence.
Perhaps we need to look not just at satisfaction in our research into employee engagement, but look at the collective intelligence of departments and ad hoc teams as well. Temporary cross-functional teams, especially, hold promise for bringing creative solutions into being. A key part of innovative new product development may very well involve building product teams with a high collective intelligence. A well-constructed group will increase the engagement of all of its members.
“There’s been a tendency to focus on the negative, the mob psychology, the idea that people can bring out the worst in each other,” according to Robert Goldstone, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, as quoted by Carolyn. “There’s just as much evidence that people can bring out the best in each other.”