Interesting article, they key comments being:
...
"but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success"
"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
First,
their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions,
rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
Second,
their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the
Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states
from images of faces with only the eyes visible.
Finally,
teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it
appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and
women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more
women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that
women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men."
...
"This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as
much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as
for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be
not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general
ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what
other people feel, know and believe."