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

Abstract

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 demonstrates 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 composition. 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 hierarchical team structure and vary team gender composition. We examine how team structure leads to different behavioral manifestations of collective attention as evidenced in team speaking patterns. We find that a stable hierarchical structure increases more cooperative, synchronous speaking patterns but that unstable hierarchical structure and a lack of specified hierarchical structure both increase competitive, interruptive speaking patterns. Moreover, the effect of cooperative versus competitive speaking patterns on collective intelligence is moderated by the teams’ gender composition; 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 organizational teams.

Understanding Collective Intelligence: Investigating the Role of Collective Memory, Attention, and Reasoning Processes

“…However, as mentioned previously, these transactive systems operate in an undetectable manner to observers and often outside the explicit awareness of the participants themselves. Therefore, to provide insight into these processes, particularly for agent-based teammates, recent work has developed computational indicators of transactive-system functioning using observable collaborative-process behaviors (Gupta et al, 2023;Riedl et al, 2021;Woolley, Chow, et al, 2023).…”

“…For instance, work in cognitive and social psychology has defined collective memory (e.g., Vlasceanu et al, 2018) and shared attention (Shteynberg, 2015) according to whether the cognition of different group members is the same. By contrast, research in organizational psychology on collective attention (Woolley, Chow, et al, 2023) or transactive memory (Ren & Argote, 2011) has evaluated the strength of these collective cognitive systems according to the total capacity of information they can effectively manage, which is enhanced when the content of members’ cognition is mostly unique. On the basis of this latter perspective, collaborators in well-functioning systems focus on different areas of their shared work but also know others’ areas of responsibility to facilitate coordination.…”

“…Whether in small face-to-face groups or larger distributed human-machine collaborations, the development of a TAS involves three intermember transactive processes that facilitate the efficient utilization of collective attention: (a) updating understanding of individual and collective focus areas and current demands on contributors’ attention, (b) allocation of one’s own attention as guided by the formal or informal structures and norms of the collective, and (c) retrieval of attention in response to urgent needs or coordinating changes in collective priorities and when synchronous attention is required. Groups with a robust attentional-retrieval mechanism exhibit organized patterns of synchronous attention, sometimes manifest as “burstiness,” in which longer stretches of independent work separate concentrated periods of interaction (Mayo & Woolley, 2021; Woolley, Chow, et al, 2023). As with TMS, the management of attentional processes can emerge organically in small and highly interdependent groups but typically requires more explicit structures in larger and less interdependent groups or networks to serve as a foundation (O’Leary et al, 2011).…”

“…For collaboration to remain viable, collaborators must perceive that their efforts pursuing goals with the group are more valuable than pursuing them on their own or elsewhere (Raveendran et al, 2020). Building on extant work on transactive-goal dynamics, integrated with research on negotiations and collective reasoning (Bacharach, 1989; Colman et al, 2008; Fitzsimons et al, 2015; Gupta & Woolley, 2021), researchers of recent work have described TRS as a dynamic system consisting of members’ knowledge of their own and others’ goals and the transactive processes enabling members to reason about and maximize joint rewards by negotiating and aligning collective goals (Gupta, 2022; Gupta & Woolley, 2021; Haan, 2023; Woolley, Gupta, & Glikson, 2023).…”

Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas

“…Nevertheless, in professional settings gender dynamics can produce a propensity for same-gender teams ( 8 – 12 ) that potentially reduces workgroup diversity and fairness ( 13 – 16 ). In addition, the degree to which laboratory studies reliably generalize to practice and policy in real-world settings is unclear ( 17 – 19 ). Given the potential yet unknown implications of the rise in teamwork and women’s participation in medical research, we conducted a large-scale study of how changing gender demographics, team creation ( 20 , 21 ), and team performance ( 22 , 23 ) are reshaping medical science research practice and impact using an original dataset of over 6.6 million medical research papers published in more than 15,000 journals over the last 20 y.…”