January 17, 2020
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Title: Optimal Team Construction for a Complex Task
Abstract: The problem of optimizing team performance by judicious selection of team members has preoccupied management scientists and managers alike for generations. Different theories have disagreed on which individual attributes (e.g. skill, cognitive style, social perceptiveness) are most relevant to team performance, and also whether average level/type matters more or less than diversity. Finally, theories of team performance have been largely silent on the relevance of task complexity; i.e. to what extent does the optimal composition of a team depend on the complexity of the task being performed? Here we address several of these problems simultaneously, using a novel “two-phase” experimental design. In the first phase, 1200 subjects first completed a sequence of tasks of variable complexity and were each scored on skill, cognitive style, and social perceptiveness. In the second phase, the same subjects completed a second sequence of variable complexity tasks, where this time they were randomly assigned either to work again as individuals or in teams of three with high/low/mixed skill and high/low social perceptiveness. Our findings help reconcile previously conflicting claims from the collective intelligence literature and motivate a future research program to identify stable principles of team performance.
Bio: Duncan Watts is the twenty-third PIK University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, holding a joint appointment at the Annenberg School, the Department of Computer and Information Science, and the Wharton School. Prior to Penn, Watts was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He was also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. His research on social networks and collective dynamics has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett M. Rogers Award. Watts is the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (2003), Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (1999), and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (2011). He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Australian Defense Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.
***Lunch will be catered at 11:20am in the common area of the B-wing on the 4th floor of 3401 Walnut St.