Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Apr;16(2):302-321.
doi: 10.1111/tops.12706. Epub 2023 Nov 5.

The Effects of Group Composition and Dynamics on Collective Performance

Abdullah Almaatouq  1 , Mohammed Alsobay  1 , Ming Yin  2 , Duncan J Watts  3   4   5
Affiliations
Free article

The Effects of Group Composition and Dynamics on Collective Performance

Abdullah Almaatouq et al. Top Cogn Sci. 2024 Apr.
Free article

Abstract

As organizations gravitate to group-based structures, the problem of improving performance through judicious selection of group members has preoccupied scientists and managers alike. However, which individual attributes best predict group performance remains poorly understood. Here, we describe a preregistered experiment in which we simultaneously manipulated four widely studied attributes of group compositions: skill level, skill diversity, social perceptiveness, and cognitive style diversity. We find that while the average skill level of group members, skill diversity, and social perceptiveness are significant predictors of group performance, skill level dominates all other factors combined. Additionally, we explore the relationship between patterns of collaborative behavior and performance outcomes and find that any potential gains in solution quality from additional communication between the group members are outweighed by the overhead time cost, leading to lower overall efficiency. However, groups exhibiting more "turn-taking" behavior are considerably faster and thus more efficient. Finally, contrary to our expectation, we find that group compositional factors (i.e., skill level and social perceptiveness) are not associated with the amount of communication between group members nor turn-taking dynamics.

Keywords: Collective intelligence; Collective performance; Group composition; Virtual labs.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Aggarwal, I., & Woolley, A. W. (2019). Team creativity, cognition, and cognitive style diversity. Management Science, 65(4), 1586–1599.
    1. Almaatouq, A., Alsobay, M., Yin, M., & Watts, D. J. (2021). Task complexity moderates group synergy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(36), e2101062118.
    1. Almaatouq, A., Becker, J., Houghton, J. P., Paton, N., Watts, D. J., & Whiting, M. E. (2021). Empirica: A virtual lab for high‐throughput macro‐level experiments. Behavior Research Methods, 53(5), 2158–2171.
    1. AlShebli, B. K., Rahwan, T., & Woon, W. L. (2018). The preeminence of ethnic diversity in scientific collaboration. Nature Communication, 9(1), 5163.
    1. Bahrami, B., Olsen, K., Latham, P. E., Roepstorff, A., Rees, G., & Frith, C. D. (2010). Optimally interacting minds. Science, 329(5995), 1081–1085.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources