Collective Attention and Collective Intelligence: The Role of Hierarchy and Team Gender Composition

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Woolley, Anita Williams; Chow, Rosalind M.; Mayo, Anna T.; Riedl, Christoph; Chang, Jin Wook
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University; Johns Hopkins University; Northeastern University; Korea University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2022.1602
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE; team hierarchy; TEAM COMPOSITION; Gender differences; collective attention

摘要

Collective intelligence (CI) captures a team's ability to work together across a wide range of tasks and can vary significantly between teams. Extant work demon-strates that the level of collective attention a team develops has an important influence on its level of CI. An important question, then, is what enhances collective attention? Prior work demonstrates an association with team composition; here, we additionally examine the influence of team hierarchy and its interaction with team gender composi-tion. To do so, we conduct an experiment with 584 individuals working in 146 teams in which we randomly assign each team to work in a stable, unstable, or unspecified hier-archical team structure and vary team gender composition. We examine how team structure leads to different behavioral manifestations of collective attention as evi-denced in team speaking patterns. We find that a stable hierarchical structure increases more cooperative, synchronous speaking patterns but that unstable hierarchical struc-ture and a lack of specified hierarchical structure both increase competitive, inter-ruptive speaking patterns. Moreover, the effect of cooperative versus competitive speaking patterns on collective intelligence is moderated by the teams' gender compo-sition; majority female teams exhibit higher CI when their speaking patterns are more cooperative and synchronous, whereas all male teams exhibit higher CI when their speaking involves more competitive interruptions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for enhancing collective intelligence in organiza-tional teams.