Research

A collection of research papers on team performance and thriving

Collective Intelligence and Group Performance

Anita Williams Woolley, Ishani Aggarwal, Thomas W. Malone

https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415599543

A seminal study on Collective Intelligence (CI). Perhaps surprisingly, the IQs of the people in the team only weakly correlate to the team's CI.

What impacts CI far more is the number of people with high social perceptiveness and how frequent and equal the communication in the team is. Teams with a buzz of democratic communication perform better than those with less, or a few hubs of, communication.

Most importantly, unlike IQ, CI can be dramatically improved by how the team works

Quotes

"The teams that were highly collectively intelligent earned significantly higher scores on their group assignments even though their members did not do any better on the individual assignments. Furthermore, the highly collectively intelligent teams exhibited steady improvement in performance across the series of tests, suggesting that the teams got better at retaining information collectively and applying it to their assignments over time."

Practical tips

Swarming: If possible, have a bucket of tasks that your team can pick up for themselves. Then have open channels of communication among the team members. The more open channels, the better.

Have a time in the daily team meeting where people can present something they're working on for input from the rest of the team (include yourself).

Have a chat channel where team members can run things by the rest of the team.

The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback

Jackie Gnepp, Joshua Klayman, Ian O. Williamson, Sema Barlas

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234444

Mixed and negative feedback builds distrust, as does feedback that primarily looks back on past performance. The more detailed the critical or backward-focused feedback, the greater the distrust. Feedback that is forward-focused gets far better results.

Quotes

"In all studies, recipients of mixed and negative feedback doubted the accuracy of the feedback and the providers’ qualifications to give it."

"Managers were motivated to improve to the extent they perceived the feedback conversation to be focused on future actions rather than on past performance."

Practical tips

Momentum plans: Track what specific skills, work done, and responsibilities each team member had in six month intervals in the past. Project that forward into the next 6 and 12 months to get a trajectory. Then discuss that with the team member and adjust the projection based on what they get into the flow for and what the team needs: plan out the ideal shape they can fill in the team.

Free Momentum Plan Template

When fixing problems kills personal development: fMRI reveals conflict between Real and Ideal selves.

Anthony Ian Jack, Angela M. Passarelli, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1128209

Focusing on the Ideal Self (hopes & aspirations) self-motivates people to learn and adapt. Critical and negative feedback activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze), which shuts down the prefrontal cortex (rational thought) and creates a resistance to change.

Quotes

"a promotion focus would be most effective at helping an individual adopt new goals, persist at them, and find enjoyment in striving toward them."

"Positive affective states broaden our perceptions in a literal sense and metaphorically ... to see interconnections between disparate concepts, more inclusive cognitive categories, and enhanced memory and creativity"

"Positive emotions also facilitate persistence in learning to the point of mastery

"A strong implication of the current findings is that coaches should begin a coaching engagement by focusing as much as possible on the Ideal self.

Practical tips

Always focus on the way forward, paying most attention to what each person does best.

Build up a list of the tasks that this person gets into the flow for and work with them to be able to do more and more of those.