Abstract:

Research on collective intelligence consistently shows that some teams reliably outperform others across a wide range of tasks, suggesting that collective intelligence reflects a generalizable team capability. Yet it remains unclear which specific team attributes must be present, and at what levels, for collective intelligence to emerge. Prior studies have identified several predictors of collective intelligence, including skill, social perceptiveness, team-task fit, and team coverage, but have relied primarily on regression-based techniques, leaving open the question of whether any of these variables are necessary rather than merely beneficial. Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) offers a way to address this gap by identifying non-compensatory constraints: conditions without which outcomes cannot occur, regardless of other variables. Using data from 573 teams (2,018 individuals) across 22 experimental studies reported by Riedl et al. (2021), we applied NCA to examine whether team skill, social perceptiveness, team-task fit, and team coverage function as necessary conditions for the occurrence of collective intelligence. The results show that skill (d = .205), social perceptiveness (d = .269), and team-task fit (d = .286) show a medium necessity effect for the occurrence of collective intelligence, whereas team coverage (d = .333) shows a high necessity effect. At the same time, the thresholds for necessary effects on the occurrence of collective intelligence differ systematically across predictors: Team coverage, skill, social perceptiveness, and team-task fit all constrain collective intelligence already at below-mean levels. As the level of collective intelligence gradually increases, team coverage emerges as the earliest bottleneck, followed by skill, then social perceptiveness, with team-task fit becoming constraining last, yet still below the mean level of collective intelligence. Together, the findings qualify prior convergent and contrasting results in the literature and underscore the distinct yet interdependent necessity of mental, structural, and processual mechanisms in enabling the collective intelligence of human teams.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Organisational Psychology

Keywords: Emotional Intelligence and Its Implications for the Workplace    ;Creativity in teams and at work    ;Cognition in organisations   

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Dr. Haien Ding