Team intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations
Executive summary
Team Intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations
The underlying change driving an increased use of groups and teams for coordination is the increasing specialization, and the number of experts and specialists needing to come together and coordinate. This, in turn, drives complexity, and the only way for organizations to deal with complexity in the long run is by intelligence, that is intelligent coordination. Essential in this intelligent coordination of organizations will be the group level. Teams or micro-systems is the operational unit in which the organization’s need of coordination becomes dependent of the intelligence, behavior, emotional and social skills of individuals. These factors create a variance in collective intelligence. Average collective intelligence at micro-system level is therefore a fairly new way of describing organizational performance. The purpose of this report, which is a literature review, is to give an overview of how collective intelligence at micro-system level has been defined, how it relates to organizational performance, what factors have been identified as causing variance and what types of interventions at team level have been discussed. A total of 92 articles and two dissertations were selected based on a search of EBSCO/Business Source Premier.
Executive summary
Team Intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations
The underlying change driving an increased use of groups and teams for coordination is the increasing specialization, and the number of experts and specialists needing to come together and coordinate. This, in turn, drives complexity, and the only way for organizations to deal with complexity in the long run is by intelligence, that is intelligent coordination. Essential in this intelligent coordination of organizations will be the group level. Teams or micro-systems is the operational unit in which the organization’s need of coordination becomes dependent of the intelligence, behavior, emotional and social skills of individuals. These factors create a variance in collective intelligence. Average collective intelligence at micro-system level is therefore a fairly new way of describing organizational performance. The purpose of this report, which is a literature review, is to give an overview of how collective intelligence at micro-system level has been defined, how it relates to organizational performance, what factors have been identified as causing variance and what types of interventions at team level have been discussed. A total of 92 articles and two dissertations were selected based on a search of EBSCO/Business Source Premier.
Team intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations
Introduction
The underlying forces behind what we claim is an increasing interest in collective intelligence are specialization and knowledge distribution. As society becomes ever more specialized and knowledge distributed it also becomes more complex, and we become increasingly dependent on how to integrate all this knowledge (Tsoukas, 1996; Grant, 1996). This is what is behind the knowledge economy and the increased importance of intangibles such as knowledge and intellectual resources, the need for innovation, and the means to realize intellectual capabilities. As a result, organizational effectiveness and innovation have become more dependent of what has been called knowledge management. In early studies of this development, the issues of knowledge management were largely identified as how to capture and redistribute knowledge with the help of new information technology. Following that, focus turned to other aspects of managing organizational knowledge, such as processes, special forums, training programs, mentoring, and so forth, but still with the tools and thinking of the industrial society (see Furusten & Werr, 2012, for a recent overview). Most of the research on knowledge management, however, avoided addressing a central phenomenon in knowledge integration and organizational coordination, namely the professional work groups and micro-systems1 (Gardner, Gino, & Staats, 2012). Studies show that the proportion of coordination in organizations, in the form of more or less independent work groups, increases in general and especially in so-called cross-functional teams2 (Benders et al., 2001; Pearce & Conger, 2003; Salas et al, 2008; Klein et al, 2009, DeChurch & Mesemer-Magnus, 2010; Cross, Rebele, & Grant, 2016). Both governmental agencies and private industry are increasingly relying upon work teams as a preferred performance arrangement to fulfill their visions, execute their complex missions, and accomplish their goals (Salas et al, 2008). Sweden, may in this respect, be one of the countries where development has progressed the furthest.
The underlying change driving the increase in the use of groups and teams for coordination is, of course the increasing number of specialists needing to come together and coordinate. This, in turn, drives complexity, and the only way for organizations to deal with complexity in the long run is by intelligence; intelligent coordination. As this report will show, some of the most important means of realizing organizational intelligence will be the cognitive, social and emotional capabilities of teams. Integrating knowledge between individuals, at group level, is not merely a matter of connecting different forms of information sources. Instead, attention needs to focus on the quality aspects by which knowledge can be integrated and coordinated, what we here will call collective intelligence. Despite a vast literature on teamwork and group effectiveness, present theory speaks very little about the cognitive and emotional dimensions of teamwork, yet those are exactly what will become the cornerstones of performance in the changing economy (Goyal & Akhilesh, 2007). There is ample support in the literature for the contention that team-based forms of organizing are beneficial both to organizations and to individuals. Team-based work leads to improvements in organizational performance on measures of both efficiency and quality (Klein et al, 2009). However, the simple existence of a team-based organizing structure is not enough to ensure that positive outcomes will result. Teams must be nurtured, supported, and developed, or else they may actually be a worse alternative to individuals working alone (Lyubovnikova et al, 2015 2015).
In the end, today’s organizations are populated with an increasing number of work teams, because of increasing specialization of knowledge. Motivated and successful teams, coordinating this knowledge, are becoming the key to successful organizations, but knowledge integration in work teams continues to be a prominent issue in most organizations. Our hope is that this report will contribute to our understanding of these phenomena and the development of organizational strategies for collective intelligence.
Author
Philip Runsten
philip.runsten@hhs.se
Researcher
PhD, Stockholm School of Economics
Senior Consultant, Founder
Influence
