The so-called “collective intelligence” is the general effectiveness of a team on a wide range of tasks. Collective intelligence or the “c factor” predicts how well the teams perform more complex tasks, “above and beyond the predictive ability of the average individual intelligence of group members”. In other words, there is something to a team that is indeed more than the sum of its parts.
There is only a mild correlation between the intelligence of a teams’ individual members and its collective intelligence – So, putting a lot of smart people together in a team does not necessarily create a smart team.
So, what does determine the collective intelligence of a team?
The ability of individual team members to “read minds” or more precisely the “ability to make inferences about others’ mental states” determines the collective intelligence of a team. Collective intelligence rises when there is a more equality in conversational turn taking.
Raising the collective intelligence of a team is important as it determines for more than 40% the performance of your team.
The easiest way to increase the collective intelligence in the team is rather straightforward: Add more women to your team!
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