Intellective Task Research Articles

Who benefits from virtual collaboration? The interplay of team member expertness and Big Five personality traits

This research applies and integrates transactive memory systems (TMS) theory and the Big Five personality traits model to investigate the performance dynamics of dyadic teams engaged in virtual collaborative problem-solving (CPS). Specifically, this study examines how the personal attributes of team members, including their expertness and Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism), as well as the resultant diversity in expertness and Big Five personality traits within teams, influence both team-level and individual-level performance gain from virtual collaboration. Studying 377 dyadic teams composed of 754 individuals working on an online collaborative intellective task, this research found that dyads with high expertness diversity had greater performance gain from virtual collaboration than dyads with low expertness diversity. Further, dyads, where both members scored low on agreeableness, showed the most significant improvement in team performance. At the individual level, a team member who had a low expertness level but was paired with a high-expertness teammate demonstrated the greatest performance gain from virtual collaboration. The integration of TMS theory and the Big Five personality traits model provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of how individual attributes and team dynamics contribute to successful virtual CPS outcomes.

Hierarchies and decision-making in groups: experimental evidence

While individual decision-making is a principal research area in theoretical and experimental economics, many decisions are actually made by groups, and not by individuals. In addition, groups are often characterized by hierarchical organizational structures, but little is known about their possible effects on outcomes in economic experiments. This exploratory study investigates differences in decision-making outcomes for individuals and groups under different hierarchies using data from an incentivized economic experiment using a sample of South Korean college students and Bayesian hypothesis testing, frequentist regression analysis, and analysis of predicted probabilities for “ideal types”. It compares the choices of groups of three in lottery choices and intellective tasks under five different hierarchy types: a group without hierarchy, a hierarchy by age, by merit, by chance, and by election. A within-subjects comparison of choices as individuals and as leaders allows to control for individual differences that might matter for choices beyond the hierarchy type. Regression results show that there are no differences in the number of safe choices between the different hierarchy types, but groups with a leader assigned based on merit perform better in intellective tasks, compared to leaders assigned based on a vote, age, or a random mechanism. These findings suggest that the type of hierarchy and its perceived legitimacy might matter for the quality of outcomes in intellective tasks, with no effects found for risk attitude.

Videoconference and Embodied VR: Communication Patterns Across Task and Medium

Videoconference has become the dominant technology for remote meetings. Embodied Virtual Reality is a potential alternative that employs motion tracking in order to place people in a shared virtual environment as avatars. This paper describes a 210 participant study focused on behavioral measures that compares multiparty interaction in videoconference and embodied VR across a range of task types: a factual intellective task, a subjective judgment task and two negotiation tasks, one with visual grounding. It uses state-of-the-art body, face and finger tracking to drive the avatars in VR and a carefully matched videoconferencing implementation. Significant behavioral differences are observed. These include increased activity in videoconference related to maintaining the social connection: more person directed gaze and increased verbal and nonverbal backchannel behavior. Videoconference also had reduced conversational overlap, increased self-adaptor gestures and reduced deictic gestures as compared with embodied VR. Potential explanations and implications are discussed.

Humans rely more on algorithms than social influence as a task becomes more difficult

Algorithms have begun to encroach on tasks traditionally reserved for human judgment and are increasingly capable of performing well in novel, difficult tasks. At the same time, social influence, through social media, online reviews, or personal networks, is one of the most potent forces affecting individual decision-making. In three preregistered online experiments, we found that people rely more on algorithmic advice relative to social influence as tasks become more difficult. All three experiments focused on an intellective task with a correct answer and found that subjects relied more on algorithmic advice as difficulty increased. This effect persisted even after controlling for the quality of the advice, the numeracy and accuracy of the subjects, and whether subjects were exposed to only one source of advice, or both sources. Subjects also tended to more strongly disregard inaccurate advice labeled as algorithmic compared to equally inaccurate advice labeled as coming from a crowd of peers.

Pre-screening workers to overcome bias amplification in online labour markets.

Groups have access to more diverse information and typically outperform individuals on problem solving tasks. Crowdsolving utilises this principle to generate novel and/or superior solutions to intellective tasks by pooling the inputs from a distributed online crowd. However, it is unclear whether this particular instance of "wisdom of the crowd" can overcome the influence of potent cognitive biases that habitually lead individuals to commit reasoning errors. We empirically test the prevalence of cognitive bias on a popular crowdsourcing platform, examining susceptibility to bias of online panels at the individual and aggregate levels. We then investigate the use of the Cognitive Reflection Test, notable for its predictive validity for both susceptibility to cognitive biases in test settings and real-life reasoning, as a screening tool to improve collective performance. We find that systematic biases in crowdsourced answers are not as prevalent as anticipated, but when they occur, biases are amplified with increasing group size, as predicted by the Condorcet Jury Theorem. The results further suggest that pre-screening individuals with the Cognitive Reflection Test can substantially enhance collective judgement and improve crowdsolving performance.

Did It Have To End This Way?

Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team's collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.

Silence is golden: team problem solving and communication costs

We conduct experiments comparing the performance of individuals and teams of four subjects in solving two rather different tasks. The first involves nonograms, logic puzzles that require a series of incremental steps to solve. The second task uses CRT-type questions, which require a single, specific insight. Contrary to the existing literature, team performance in both tasks is statistically indistinguishable from that of individuals when communication is costless. If a tiny message cost is imposed, team performance improves and becomes statistically better than that of individuals, although still worse than previous research on teams would have suggested. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to find that imposing friction on communication leads to more effective performance in teams. Message costs reduce the quantity of messages but increase the quality, specifically the mix of good and bad suggestions. The improved quality of communication with message costs allows teams to out-perform individuals. Our analysis suggests that organizations would do better by identifying an able individual to perform an intellective task rather than using teams; prediction exercises indicate that this will not harm, and will generally increase, performance relative to a team, and only requires the cost of paying one individual rather than many.

Team performance in space crews: Houston, we have a teamwork problem

Space crews venturing beyond low Earth orbit will experience unprecedented levels of autonomy and unpredictable challenges. Mission success will require effective teamwork. How do teamwork capabilities change over time in isolation and confinement? To explore this question, 4, 4-member crews who participated in the 30-day campaign of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)'s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) were observed. Crews endured isolation, confinement, and communication delays. Teamwork capabilities were observed along four critical dimensions: generate (creativity tasks), choose (intellective tasks), negotiate (cognitive conflict tasks), and execute (psychomotor tasks). A battery of team task was administered requiring the crew to generate, to choose, and to negotiate. Execute performance was assessed using NASA's multi-mission space exploration vehicle (MMSEV) task. Team task batteries were performed on Mission Days 11, 16, and 30. Execute performance was assessed on 18 of 30 days. Findings show behavioral team performance (cognitive conflict and psychomotor tasks) increases over time, whereas conceptual team performance (creativity and intellective tasks) declines. Implications of these results were considered for future research and the design of countermeasures that support crew functioning.

Robust Improvements on Reasoning Performance Following Discussion in Japan

AbstractGroup discussion significantly improves performance on intellective problems. However, most experiments have been conducted in Western cultures. Cross‐cultural psychology suggests that members of Eastern cultures might be less likely to benefit from group discussion. One experiment in Japan suggested that this was not the case, but this experiment suffered from some limitations. To address these limitations, Japanese participants were asked to solve an intellective task four times: individually (pre‐test), in small discussion groups (test), individually again (transfer task, post‐test), and individually after a delay (delayed post‐test). The results revealed a robust improvement during group discussion. Groups in which at least one member had found the correct answer individually agreed on it during the discussion. Moreover, and in contrast with results obtained in Western cultures, most groups with no such member also found the correct answer. The gains obtained during discussion were maintained in the transfer tasks. This result provides further evidence that the improvement of reasoning performance in group discussion is a universal phenomenon, and provides support for the practice of collaborative learning in Japan.

Are groups ‘less behavioral’? The case of anchoring

Economic small group research points to groups as more rational decision-makers in numerous economic situations. However, no attempts have been made to investigate whether groups are affected similarly by behavioral biases that are pervasive for individuals. If groups were also able to more effectively avoid these biases, the relevance of biases in actual economic contexts dominated by group decision-making might be questioned. We consider the case of anchoring as a prime example of a well-established, robust bias. Individual and group biasedness in three economically relevant domains are compared: factual knowledge, probability estimates and price valuations. In contrast to previous anchoring studies, we find groups to successfully reduce, albeit not eliminate, anchoring in the factual knowledge domain. For the other two domains, groups and individuals are equally biased by external anchors. Group cooperation thus reduces biases for predominantly intellective tasks only, while no such reduction is achieved when judgmental aspects are involved.

Group decision rules and group rationality under risk

This paper investigates the rationality of group decisions versus individual decisions under risk. We study two group decision rules, majority and unanimity, in stochastic dominance and Allais paradox tasks. We distinguish communication effects (the effects of group discussions and interactions) from aggregation effects (mere impact of the voting procedure), which makes it possible to better understand the complex dynamics of group decision making. In an experiment, both effects occurred for intellective tasks whereas there were only aggregation effects in judgmental tasks. Communication effects always led to more rational choices; aggregation effects did so sometimes but not always. Groups violated stochastic dominance less often than individuals did, which was due to both aggregation and communication effects. In the Allais paradox tasks, there were almost no communication effects, and aggregation effects made groups deviate more from expected utility than individuals.

Same Process, Different Outcomes: Group Performance in an Acquiring a Company Experiment

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellective tasks. We report that in an Acquiring a Company game, what prevailed when there was disagreement among group members was the median proposal and not the best proposal. This aggregation rule explains why groups underperformed with respect to a truth wins benchmark and why they performed better than individuals deciding in isolation in a simple version of the task but worse in the more difficult version. Implications are drawn on when to employ groups rather than individuals in decision making.

Same process, different outcomes: group performance in an acquiring a company experiment

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellective tasks. We report that in an Acquiring a Company game, what prevailed when there was disagreement among group members was the median proposal and not the best proposal. This aggregation rule explains why groups underperformed with respect to a “truth wins” benchmark and why they performed better than individuals deciding in isolation in a simple version of the task but worse in the more difficult version. Implications are drawn on when to employ groups rather than individuals in decision making.

E-mail as the Appropriate Method of Communication for the Decision-Maker When Soliciting Advice for an Intellective Decision Task.

For many problems in operating room and anesthesia group management, there are tasks with optimal decisions, and yet experienced personnel tend to make decisions that are worse or no better than random chance. Such decisions include staff scheduling, case scheduling, moving cases among operating rooms, and choosing patient arrival times. In such settings, operating room management leadership decision-making should typically be autocratic rather than participative. Autocratic-style decision-making calls for managers to solicit and consider feedback from stakeholders in the decision outcome but to make the decision themselves using their expert knowledge and the facts received. For this to be effective, often the manager will obtain expert advice from outside the organization (e.g., health system). In this narrative review, we evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using prompt asynchronous written communication (i.e., e-mail) as a communication channel for such interaction between a decision-maker (manager) and advisor. A detailed Appendix (Supplemental Digital Content, http://links.lww.com/AA/B72) lists each observational and experimental result. We find that the current ubiquitous role of e-mail for such communication is appropriate. Its benefits include improved time management via asynchronicity, low cognitive load (e.g., relative to Web conferencing), the ability to hide undesirable and irrelevant cues (e.g., physical appearance), the appropriateness of adding desirable cues (e.g., titles and degrees), the opportunity to provide written expression of confidence, and the ability for the advisor to demonstrate the answer for the decision-maker. Given that the manager is e-mailing an advisor whose competence the manager trusts, it is unnecessary to use a richer communication channel to develop trust. Finally, many of the limitations of e-mail can be rectified through training. We expect that decades from now, e-mail (i.e., asynchronous writing) between an expert and decision-maker will remain the dominant means of communication for intellective tasks.

Inter-Group Collaboration

The purpose of this paper is to extend the theory of task/technology fit by exploring the impact of different technology characteristics on performance of preference and intellective tasks in an inter-group context. The authors tested 80 participants on group performance using a 2x2 factorial design with task type and mode of collaboration as the independent variables. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the research model and t-tests to evaluate their hypotheses. The authors confirmed their hypothesis that the use of wiki, a technology with many elaborate technology characteristics, created a better task/technology fit than use of the more conventional email/word processor. The wiki group also demonstrated better productivity, decision quality, and satisfaction than the email/word processor group. Differences in task type, intellective vs. preference, had no effect on group performance. The authors extended the task/technology fit model by examining how different combinations of task type and technology characteristics affect team performance in the context of inter-group collaboration.

That’s not my place: The interacting effects of faultlines, subgroup size, and social competence on social loafing behaviour in work groups

Taking a social relations approach to team diversity, we propose that faultlines—hypothetical dividing lines that split a team into relatively homogeneous subgroups—impact the team members’ propensity to exhibit social loafing behaviour. We further propose that this individual-level reaction to the faultline structure of the team can differ among team members, depending on the size of their subgroup and on their individual social competence. We tested the assumptions with a sample of real teams working on an intellective task during which social loafing behaviour was video-coded. In partial support of the hypotheses, generalized mixed models revealed that social loafing behaviour was most common for team members who were part of a team with strong faultlines, who belonged to the larger subgroup in their team, and who exhibited low levels of social competence. The results therefore highlight the benefits of taking a multilevel approach to the effects of faultlines.

Choice Shifts in Small Groups Engaging in Repeated Intellective Tasks

We examine the propensity of individuals working in small groups to shift choices from their initial positions, following a group discussion, when engaged in multiple intellective tasks. We study the factors that may influence such shifts including perceptions of oneself and others, one’s specialized knowledge level, and the amount of disagreement among the initial choices. Ordered-logit regression is used to model the odds and hence the likelihood that team members switch their decisions a given number of times on the multiple tasks. Group members with high achieved status differences and distances, as measured by their ability relative to their teammates, were less likely to change positions in deference to the group. Perceptions of self were non-significant. Whether an individual was perceived to be a top performer by two or more of the other group members interacted with time, producing a positive longitudinal effect that occurs when one has influence over a majority in the group: The individual with such influence is less likely to shift while the others are more likely to shift, as the group gains experience over multiple tasks.

Arguments, more than confidence, explain the good performance of reasoning groups.

In many intellective tasks groups consistently outperform individuals. One factor is that the individual(s) with the best answer is able to convince the other group members using sound argumentation. Another factor is that the most confident group member imposes her answer whether it is right or wrong. In Experiments 1 and 2, individual participants were given arguments against their answer in intellective tasks. Demonstrating sound argumentative competence, many participants changed their minds to adopt the correct answer, even though the arguments had no confidence markers, and barely any participants changed their minds to adopt an incorrect answer. Confidence could not explain who changed their mind, as the least confident participants were as likely to change their minds as the most confident. In Experiments 3 (adults) and 4 (10-year-olds), participants solved intellective tasks individually and then in groups, before solving transfer problems individually. Demonstrating again sound argumentative competence, participants adopted the correct answer when it was present in the group, and many succeeded in transferring this understanding to novel problems. Moreover, the group member with the right answer nearly always managed to convince the group even when she was not the most confident. These results show that argument quality can overcome confidence among the factors influencing the discussion of intellective tasks. Explanations for apparent exceptions are discussed.

The moderator role of followers’ personality traits in the relations between leadership styles, two types of task performance and work result satisfaction

Authentic leadership is changing our understanding of what makes good leadership. However, few studies have explored how followers’ individual differences and the nature of the task they perform affect its relation to followers’ work outcomes. We examine the moderator role of two core task types (intellective vs. generative) and two personality traits (conscientiousness and emotional stability) in the relationship between two leadership feedback styles (authentic vs. transactional) and task performance or work result satisfaction in a two-wave experiment. The sample consisted of 228 participants enrolled in an organizational psychology course, 34% of whom had work experience. Our results show that over time the effect of an authentic feedback style on task performance became stronger for those participants who previously scored very low on intellective tasks or very high on generative tasks. Furthermore, a significant three-way interaction between these two traits and our leadership feedback styles indicates that the effect of authentic feedback conforms different patterns depending on the followers’ personality traits and the type of task they perform. Moreover, authentic feedback had a stronger effect on participants’ work result satisfaction. Participants with low levels of either conscientiousness or emotional stability displayed higher levels of satisfaction in the authentic feedback condition.

Are Groups 'Less Behavioral'? The Case of Anchoring

Economic small group research points to groups as more rational decision-makers in numerous economic situations. However, no attempts have been made to investigate whether groups are affected similarly by behavioral biases that are pervasive for individuals. If groups were also able to more effectively avoid these biases, the relevance of biases in actual economic contexts dominated by group decision-making might be questioned. We consider the case of anchoring as a prime example of a well-established, robust bias. Individual and group biasedness in three economically relevant domains are compared: factual knowledge, probability estimates and price estimates. In contrast to previous anchoring studies, we find groups to successfully reduce, albeit not eliminate, anchoring in factual knowledge tasks. For the other domains, groups and individuals are equally biased by external anchors. Group cooperation thus reduces biases for predominantly intellective tasks only, while no such reduction is achieved when judgmental aspects are involved.