I just read an article about group performance in the October issue of Science Magazine. A group of academics from Carnegie Mellon and various MIT entities studied whether there is something called collective intelligence that exists in groups of people - just as it exists in individuals -- and makes it possible to predict the group's performance on a variety of tasks. The results of two studies they conducted support their hypothesis that collective intelligence - the authors call it the "c factor" - exists in groups.

 

Then the authors-Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas Malone-set out to examine what causes the c factor. They found that some factors they thought might be a good predictor of collective intelligence were not, such as group cohesion, motivation and satisfaction. What they did find were three factors that significantly correlated with group performance and the c factor:

Joanna Barsh Josephine Mogelof and Caroline Webb  in a recent piece for McKinsey on how centered leaders achieve extraordinary results.

"Executives can thrive at work and in life by adopting a leadership model that revolves around finding their strengths and connecting with others."

The most damaging leaders I've come across in the workplace are those who don't know how to value the people who work for them. They may be egomaniacs or control freaks that suck the life out of their employees, giving little back in positive reinforcement. Some people continue to work for destructive managers because they need their job or are too demoralized to leave and find something better. Still others believe that this is the way leaders should behave-as know-it-all, empire builders-with little concern for the people who fall by the wayside. The people who don't thrive under this kind of leadership may, in fact, be viewed as poor leadership material themselves, not tough enough for the game.

 

More than one-quarter of 2010 is already over; in fact 110 days have passed this year to get us to this date-April 20. This is significant for women and their families because it represents the additional days that the average women needs to work into 2010 in order to equal the pay that the average man made in 2009. So while women have made significant gains in the business world in the last few decades, this pay gap still remains a troublesome sign of the disparity that still remains between men and women at work.

According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, the latest census statistics show that the gap between men and women's earnings widened slightly between 2007 and 2008 from women making 77.8% of men's earnings to 77%. Based on the median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, women's earnings were $35,745 and men's earnings were $46,367 in 2008. Statistics also show how little the wage gap has changed over time. Twenty years ago, for example, women earned 71.6% of men's earnings, while if you go back fifty years to 1960, women earned 60.7% of men's earnings.