[indubitable]

Google wanted to optimize teams. Couldn't find any patterns that show why one team does better than another. Saw psychology report indicating that having people free to express themselves is important for team performance, as if this is a major revelation. Rest of the paper focuses on a single anecdote that is supposed to show this.

[indubitable]

As an aside, I am familiar with and critical of the psychology report [1] they reference in this article. The paper had a psychologist break people into groups and then perform tasks like plan a shopping trip. The psychologist's data indicated that the sum of the measured aptitudes of the teams did not correlate against their performance, so they then jumps from that to suggesting that therefore individual aptitude does not affect team performance.

I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does.

[1] - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scien...

[bobby_the_whale]

"It's not fair when you reason better than us!"

-- Psychologists United Now (PUN)

[ozim]

Actually not, people free to express themselves was not major point. Major point was like from Dale Carnegie 'Don't criticise condemn or complain'. People do not like to be criticised and they work better if they feel no one is judging them.