Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

The ability of groups to collaborate effectively is of growing economic and societal importance. Research has demonstrated that group performance can be explained by a general “collective intelligence” factor. Here, we examine a more differentiated hierarchical factor structure, using a meta-analytic approach in a dataset from 22 studies, comprising 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our findings suggest that collective intelligence emerges from three lower-level sub-factors, representing collective memory, attention, and reasoning. We compare the fit of different models to each other and within different subgroups of our dataset, and find that a three-factor hierarchical model fits the data the best, and explains the structure of collective intelligence in established groups (compared to new groups) particularly well, suggesting that group cognition becomes more developed and differentiated as groups work together over time. Importantly, we find no substantive difference in the structure of collective intelligence for groups that work remotely. Our analysis offers new insights into the development of the sociocognitive systems comprising collective intelligence to guide interventions such as those made possible by AI-enabled tools.

The balance between exploration and exploitation is a central theme in organizational and strategic management research. Despite extensive prior research in this area, the understanding of factors that influence the strategic decision between exploration and exploitation as well as how this decisions affect performance remain fragmentary and contradictory. In our research project, we will add to the above-mentioned research stream by focusing on ambidexterity in strategic decision-making at the team level. Team decision making refers to the process in which members with different roles and skills use information from their environment to collectively reach decisions. However, the empirical research contexts investigated by existing studies on team decision making are far from covering the decision contexts in which teams operate in today's organizations. Empirically, we use a quasi-experimental setting in the context of e-sports game data. E-sports is a well suited research context to test theories of how teams engage with dynamic environments, because these teams compare well with traditional business teams. In the proposed research project, we aim to examine what factors influence team decision making regarding exploration and exploitation in contexts with high time pressure. We are convinced that the proposed project will make relevant theoretical and methodological contributions to the literature on organizational teams in general and team decision making in particular.