Anita Williams Woolley

Anita Williams Woolley
Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Tepper School of Business

Ph.D. Harvard University

About

90
Publications
243,462
Reads
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8,241
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - March 2016
Carnegie Mellon University
Position
  • Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory
August 2008 - July 2015
Carnegie Mellon University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)

Publications

Publications (90)
Article
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered machines are increasingly mediating our work and many of our managerial, economic, and cultural interactions. While technology enhances individual capability in many ways, how do we know that the sociotechnical system as a whole, consisting of a complex web of hundreds of human–machine interactions, is exhibitin...
Article
In recent years, we have experienced rapid development of advanced technology, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), intended to interact with and augment the abilities of humans in practically every area of life. With the rapid growth of new capabilities, such as those enabled by generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT), AI is increasingly at t...
Chapter
The internet has enabled an increasing amount of collaboration to occur via virtual teamwork, including more complex forms where individuals are working on multiple teams simultaneously. We argue that the environmental complexity teams face requires they be designed for collective intelligence, a capability enabling groups to accomplish goals acros...
Article
Many applications such as hiring and university admissions involve evaluation and selection of applicants. These tasks are fundamentally difficult, and require combining evidence from multiple different aspects (what we term "attributes"). In these applications, the number of applicants is often large, and a common practice is to assign the task to...
Article
Rapid growth in the reliance on teamwork in organizations, coupled with advances in artificial intelligence, has fueled increased use of Human Autonomy Teams (HATs) involving the collaboration of humans and agents to complete work. Although there are many successful examples of HATs, researchers and technology developers can see additional applicat...
Preprint
Many applications such as hiring and university admissions involve evaluation and selection of applicants. These tasks are fundamentally difficult, and require combining evidence from multiple different aspects (what we term "attributes"). In these applications, the number of applicants is often large, and a common practice is to assign the task to...
Article
Full-text available
A growing body of the literature shows the influence of cognitive styles, which capture the ways individuals share, encode, and process information, and their implications for collaboration. We build on this literature to investigate the special contributions of individuals with cognitive style versatility, or facility in more than one cognitive st...
Article
Collective intelligence (CI) captures a team’s ability to work together across a wide range of tasks and can vary significantly between teams. Extant work demonstrates that the level of collective attention a team develops has an important influence on its level of CI. An important question, then, is what enhances collective attention? Prior work d...
Article
In investigating how member ability is translated into group brainstorming performance, it was predicted that a group’s collective intelligence (CI) would enable it to capitalize on member ability while maximizing process gains and mitigating process losses. Ninety-nine groups were randomly assigned to complete a short brainstorming task using a hy...
Article
Full-text available
Human society faces increasingly complex problems that require coordinated collective action. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to bring together the knowledge and associated action needed to find solutions at scale. In order to unleash the potential of human and AI systems, we need to understand the core functions of collective inte...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Collective intelligence (CI) is critical to solving many scientific, business, and other problems. We find strong support for a general factor of CI using meta-analytic methods in a dataset comprising 22 studies, including 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. CI can predict performance in a range of out-of-sample criterion tasks. CI, in...
Article
Full-text available
Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can...
Preprint
Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems.Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can b...
Presentation
This symposium showcases multiple team membership (MTM) employee experiences research that examines critical individual and team-level outcomes (e.g., stress, performance, viability, citizenship behavior, and career-related outcomes) in the following two areas: (a) the experiences of MTM employees across their teams (e.g., teamwork quality, team le...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) characterizes a new generation of technologies capable of interacting with the environment and aiming to simulate human intelligence. The success of integrating AI into organizations critically depends on workers’ trust in AI technology. This review explains how AI differs from other technologies and presents the existi...
Article
Artificial Intelligence (AI) characterizes a new generation of technologies capable of interacting with the environment and aiming to simulate human intelligence. The success of integrating AI into organizations critically depends on workers’ trust in AI technology. This review explains how AI differs from other technologies and presents the existi...
Article
Full-text available
Management of effort is one of the biggest challenges in any team, and is particularly difficult in distributed teams, where behavior is relatively invisible to teammates. Awareness systems, which provide real-time visual feedback about team members’ behavior, may serve as an effective intervention tool for mitigating various sources of process-los...
Article
Full-text available
Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to reap the benefits of cognitive diversity for problem solving. A major unanswered question concerns the implications of cognitive diversity for longer-term outcomes such as team learning, with its broader effects on organizational learning and productivity. We study how cognitive style diversity in...
Article
Full-text available
Although organizations frequently use groups to solve complex problems, groups often fail to use all available expertise, thus generating suboptimal solutions. To better understand why this occurs, we distinguish between two processes that are related to expertise use, but often empirically conflated: participation and influence. Using detailed pro...
Article
Full-text available
When and why do information dashboards enhance team productivity? We explore this question in the context of project teams whose members have to work across multiple teams at the same time. We expected multi-teaming, especially that involving a high variety in team members, would have a negative effect on team performance by impairing a team's tran...
Article
In spite of the recognized importance of team creativity for organizational success, the factors that influence it are not well understood. In this paper, we address an important gap in the literature on the impact of team diversity on team creativity. We show how team cognitive diversity both enhances and inhibits team cognition, or the manner in...
Article
Recent research has demonstrated that teams exhibit collective intelligence (CI), defined as a team’s basic capacity to perform a wide variety of tasks, which is consistently predictive of future performance. Previous research has shown that CI is associated with group compositional features and group structures that facilitate collaboration and in...
Article
This research examines how the status of one’s group influences intra-group behavior and collective outcomes. Two experiments provide evidence that, compared to members of low-status groups, members of high-status groups are more concerned about their intra-group standing, which in turn can increase both the likelihood of competitive and cooperativ...
Article
Full-text available
Collective intelligence (CI), a group's capacity to perform a wide variety of tasks, is a key factor in successful collaboration. Group composition, particularly diversity and member social perceptiveness, are consistent predictors of CI, but we have limited knowledge about the mechanisms underlying their effects. To address this gap, we examine ho...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research has demonstrated that (a) groups can be characterized by a collective intelligence (CI) factor that measures their ability to perform together on a wide range of different tasks, and (b) this factor can predict groups’ performance on other tasks in the future. The current study examines whether these results translate into the world...
Article
Full-text available
Pick up any recent policy paper on women’s participation in science and you will find assurances that gender diversity enhances knowledge outcomes. Universities and science-policy stakeholders, including the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health, readily subscribe to this argument (1⇓–3). But is there, in fact, a gender-diver...
Article
Organizations are increasingly turning to crowdsourcing to solve difficult problems. This is often driven by the desire to find the best subject matter experts, strongly incentivize them, and engage them, with as little coordination cost as possible, to pool their knowledge. A growing number of authors, however, are calling for increased collaborat...
Article
Full-text available
Teams offer the potential to achieve more than any person could achieve working alone; yet, particularly in teams that span professional boundaries, it is critical to capitalize on the variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities available. This article reviews research from the field of organizational behavior to shed light on what makes for a coll...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Multicultural globally-dispersed virtual teams have become an integral part of the global workforce, however to work effectively they need to overcome many challenges. In this study we integrate two lines of research and suggest that teams’ effective performance depends on interaction between two factors – psychological safety and collective intell...
Article
Full-text available
We review recent research on collective intelligence, which we define as the ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks. We focus on two influences on a group’s collective intelligence: (a) group composition (e.g., the members’ skills, diversity, and intelligence) and (b) group interaction (e.g., structures, processes, and norms). We als...
Article
Groups typically express more confidence than individuals, yet how individual-level confidence combines during collaborative decision tasks is not well understood. We prescreened 686 community members using a novel confidence measure (a true/false trivia test) intentionally designed to be difficult (accuracy rates were not significantly better than...
Article
Full-text available
Collective intelligence (CI) is a property of groups that emerges from the coordination and collaboration of members and predicts group performance on a wide range of tasks. Previous studies of CI have been conducted with lab-based groups in the USA. We introduce a new standardized online battery to measure CI and demonstrate consistent emergence o...
Article
Full-text available
This symposium brings together researchers who study the emergence of team phenomena using different research methods. Panelists will first provide a conversation starter answering the following questions from their perspectives: 1. What is (not) emergence? 2. What do you think is the biggest challenge in studying emergence? 3. What do we need, as...
Chapter
Full-text available
In the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi, the Russian men's ice hockey team seemed poised to sweep their competition. With star players from the National Hockey League in North America and the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia, and even with a home field advantage in Russia, fans thought they were sure to win the gold medal. In fact, Russian Pre...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research with face-to-face groups found that a measure of general group effectiveness (called "collective intelligence") predicted a group's performance on a wide range of different tasks. The same research also found that collective intelligence was correlated with the individual group members' ability to reason about the mental states of o...
Article
Full-text available
Online collaborative platforms have emerged as a complementary approach to traditional organizations for coordinating the collective efforts of creative workers. However, it is surprising that they result in any productive output as individuals often work without direct monetary incentives while collaborating with unknown others. In this paper, we...
Article
Although a significant amount of research exists on how the status of groups affects intergroup behavior, and how the status of individuals influences their behavior toward other individuals, little is known about how intergroup status might affect intragroup processes. In this paper, we explore how and why group status influences group process and...
Chapter
With the increasing presence of online groups in so many sectors of our lives, it becomes more and more important to understand what influences the performance of these collectives. However, historically, research to measure and thereby improve performance for online groups has produced disparate conclusions. In this chapter, we propose enhancing t...
Data
We tested the effects of team strategic orientation on team member perceptions, work strategy and information search. In Experiment 1, 80 teams worked on a hidden profile decision-making task. A defensive team strategic orientation increased members' perceptions of the problem's scope, leading to a more process-focused work strategy and broader inf...
Chapter
Teams are increasingly the locus of creativity and innovation in organizational settings, and understanding what affects their performance is critical to organizational performance. We draw on research from two different perspectives on intellectual capital to theorize about the enablers and disablers of innovation in teams. The first perspective d...
Article
Full-text available
Organizations increasingly rely on teams to formulate plans and respond in critical situations. However, current models of team process are insensitive to the effects of team strategic orientation. This paper expands existing work on team process and strategic orientation to introduce and explicate the constructs of offensive and defensive strategi...
Article
Full-text available
Organizations increasingly rely on teams to formulate plans and respond in critical situations. However, current models of team process are insensitive to the effects of team strategic orientation. This paper expands existing work on team process and strategic orientation to introduce and explicate the constructs of offensive and defensive strategi...
Article
Responses to threat and adversity, including responses to terrorist threats, are becoming an important influence on social behavior in an increasing number of settings. This paper considers the influence of strategic orientation on the responses individuals and groups may exhibit in adversarial situations, and the consequences of these responses fo...
Article
Full-text available
Whereas some suggest that consensus is the desirable end goal in fields of science, this paper suggests that the existing literature on collective intelligence offers key alternative insights into the evolution of knowledge in scientific communities. Drawing on the papers in this special issue, we find that the papers fall across a spectrum of conv...
Article
Full-text available
Organizations use multiple team membership to enhance individual and team productivity and learning, but this structure creates competing pressures on attention and information, which make it difficult to increase both productivity and learning. Our model describes how the number and variety of multiple team memberships drive different mechanisms,...
Article
Full-text available
Given that women continue to be underrepresented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and that scientific innovations are increasingly produced by team collaborations, we reviewed the existing literature regarding the effects of gender diversity on team processes and performance. Recent evidence strongly suggests that team collaborat...
Article
Full-text available
Organizations use multiple team membership to enhance individual and team productivity and learning, but this structure creates competing pressures on attention and information, which make it difficult to increase both productivity and learning. Our model describes how the number and variety of multiple team memberships drive different mechanisms,...
Article
Full-text available
Whereas some suggest that consensus is the desirable end goal in fields of science, this paper suggests that the existing literature on collective intelligence offers key alternative insights into the evolution of knowledge in scientific communities. Drawing on the papers in this special issue, we find that the papers fall across a spectrum of conv...
Article
In two experiments, we test the effects of team strategic orientation on team member perceptions and information search. In both studies, defensive team strategic orientation increases members’ perceptions of oppositional strength and problem scope, leading to a more process-focused work strategy and greater information search. When teams need crit...
Chapter
Organizational learning theorists have proposed that teams play a critical role in organizational learning (Senge, 1990; Edmondson, 2002). Indeed, as organizations become increasingly more global, teams are formed to leverage knowledge, to increase efficiency, and to streamline work processes. However, little empirical research clarifies the link b...
Article
Full-text available
Meeting of Minds The performance of humans across a range of different kinds of cognitive tasks has been encapsulated as a common statistical factor called g or general intelligence factor. What intelligence actually is, is unclear and hotly debated, yet there is a reproducible association of g with performance outcomes, such as income and academic...
Article
Full-text available
Teams often operate in competitive situations in which they are planning action against an opponent. These situations constitute information intensive environments, as analyses of one's own strengths and liabilities and those of the opponent are necessary in planning effective action. However, current models of information processing in teams are i...
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge work frequently involves both the redefinition of desired outcomes and the specification of task processes. The relative emphasis that teams place on these issues early in work can lead members to become "outcome focused" or "process focused," with consequences for performance. This paper develops and explores a theory of how outcome focu...
Article
This paper presents a new perspective on the management of outcomes and processes in a knowledge team's work. Knowledge teams frequently face complex, open-ended tasks for which the a priori specification of goals and work processes is not possible. Such teams must define these work elements themselves; emphasizing one over the other can lead a tea...
Article
Full-text available
To reap the value in diverse teams, leaders may try to manipulate structural interdependence – through task design – to foster synergistic collaboration. However, ambiguity about the nature and appropriate intersections of members’ unique and valuable cognitive perspectives can make it difficult to fully anticipate collaborative activity in task de...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates the separate and joint effects of the inclusion of experts and collaborative planning on the performance of analytic teams. Teams either did or did not include members with expert-level task-relevant cognitive abilities, and either did or did not receive an intervention that fostered collaborative planning. Results support t...
Article
Full-text available
Advances in understanding neural processes open the possibility of using brain-based measures to compose collaborative work teams. Neuroimaging studies have shown that individual differences in patterns of brain activity can predict differences in performance of specific tasks. We extended this finding by examining performance not simply by a singl...
Chapter
Full-text available
There is a long tradition of research on work in teams and their increasingly important use as an approach to organizational design. While the implicit assumption has been that individuals work on one team at a time, many individuals are now being asked to juggle several projects and their associated multiple team memberships (MTM) simultaneously....
Article
Full-text available
The well-established dissociation between the ventral object and dorsal spatial processing streams within the visual system suggests a contrast between object and spatial visual cognitive styles. We assessed the validity of this distinction using a self-report questionnaire in a sample of 3839 online participants, and laboratory cognitive tests in...
Article
Full-text available
The development and validation of the Teacher Beliefs Survey (TBS) is described. The TBS, an instrument for assessing the beliefs of teachers related to constructivist and traditional approaches to teaching and learning, contains 21 items in three hypothetical constructs. Elementary teachers, preservice (n = 61) and in-service (n = 137), participat...
Article
Full-text available
This study explores the main and interactive effects on group task performance of two types of intervention (interpersonal vs. task focused) administered at two different times (the beginning vs. the temporal midpoint of work). The results show that timing and content of intervention interact to affect group task performance. The discussion draws o...
Article
While organizations strive to manage the time and attention of workers effectively, the practice of asking workers to contribute to multiple teams simultaneously can result in the opposite. We present a model of the effects of multiple team membership (MTM) on learning and productivity via the mediating processes of individual context switching, te...
Article
Full-text available
The measure of collective intelligence (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010) captures a team‘s ability to perform well across a wide array of tasks and can be used to predict future team performance. In this study, we explored the effect of collective intelligence on team learning. As predicted, we found a positive relationship betwe...

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