Steven Rice — Group Intelligence Correlates With Social Aptitude, Not IQ

Considering the complexity and global nature of business today, work is nearly always a team activity, and often those teams are embedded in ever-shifting networks. A new field of study, collective intelligence, is measuring the ability of teams to solve problems. This research is yielding powerful insights into improving the performance of networks, teams, and other collective groups. One breakthrough finding shows that collective intelligence is variable and measurable and — most surprisingly — correlates more with the social abilities of the team members than with the team's aggregate individual IQ....

In large 21st century organizations, executives have recognized that networks and teams play a key role in organizational excellence and are a form of collective intelligence. It's true that networks foster innovation through informal collaboration and the exchange of expertise and ideas. Networks also move information quickly and freely and determine where work really happens and how. Whether we like it or not, hierarchies are more and more relics of the past while networks determine where value is created.

The Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Group Intelligence Correlates With Social Aptitude, Not IQ
Steven Rice

"Collective" means that "networks, teams, and other collective groups" are social systems comprised of elements and subsystems, together with relationships, usually rule-based and characterized as cultural or institutional. Cultural relationships are informal, based on tradition and convention, and they are implicit. Institutional arrangements are generally formal and explicit. A collective group is structurally and functionally different from an aggregate. Collective groups exhibit collective consciousness and coordinated behavior that is different from aggregates.