Want a smart team? Staff it with smart people.

A glance at Smart groups of smart people: Evidence for IQ as the origin of collective intelligence in the performance of human groups by Timothy C. Batesa and Shivani Gupta seemed to be simply indicating that scientists were reporting the discovery that smart people make smart groups.

But the abstract is more revealing. There is a deep desire in some quarters that IQ should not be such an influential factor given that it is not distributed equally. Hypotheses have been generated that team effectiveness or IQ is predicated on the number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing. Batesa and Gupta were testing these hypotheses. Their finding is that these don't determine group effectiveness. IQ does. From the abstract.

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.

Their graph showing the relationship between group IQ and individual IQ puts it much more starkly.