Women, and The Paradoxes of Work Intelligence
The more we look into the cognitive basis of team and business performance, the more we learn about the strengths of women relative to men.
One of the surprisingly unintuitive facts of the workplace is what I think of as one of the Paradoxes of Work Intelligence: adding a highly intelligent person to a team does not always increase the performance of the team, and can in fact decrease it.
The reason? It turns out that the most critical skills — or psychological orientation — for team competence are not the ones that are associated with individual problem solving. What makes teams work is the presence of people who are socially sensitive, who possess what is called ‘theory of mind’: they are adept at creating and maintaining a sense of what is on the minds of others in the group.
Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our 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. — Wooley, et al.
The research of Anita Wooley, Thomas Malone, Christopher Chabris, and various other contributors in recent years has shed light on these dynamics. In 2010, the set about to find out if there is a group ‘collective intelligence’ that makes teams work more effectively on solving complex problems, and they found that social sensitivity was the key.
Read the entire post on Substack: Paradoxes of Engagement: What Makes Teams Work?
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