The Team player effect - why EQ matches IQ

Think of the colleague everyone wants on their project. Not necessarily the loudest in the room, not the one with the most impressive CV, just the person who makes the whole thing work a bit better when they’re involved. I can think of several from my career.

These people are the best. Meetings run smoother, work gets done - interactions are enjoyable. They care! It’s wonderful.

It turns out we can now measure that person. In a study published in Econometrica, Harvard economists Ben Weidmann and David Deming randomly assigned hundreds of people to multiple teams at the Harvard Decision Science Lab and tracked who consistently made their groups outperform what the individual skills predicted. Some people did it every time. They called them team players.

Team players did not score higher on IQ. They did not differ on personality, education or gender. What they did score higher on was social intelligence, measured through a well-established reading-the-mind test. Social skills, the authors concluded, improve team performance about as much as IQ does.

We spend enormous effort selecting for cognitive horsepower and domain expertise, then drop people into teams and hope the social glue appears by itself. The research suggests the social glue is doing roughly half the work. Miss it, and you are hiring half a performer.

The mechanism is quieter than you might expect. Team players do not save the day with heroic interventions. The paper found suggestive evidence that they simply increase the effort of the people around them. They ask the question that unlocks the problem. They notice when someone has gone silent. They translate between the person who wants to move fast and the person who wants to get it right. The effect is ambient, which is why it rarely shows up on a performance review and almost never shows up on a CV.

It also goes the other way, which is the part nobody wants to talk about. If one team player lifts the group, one persistently difficult colleague pulls it down, and the pull tends to be stronger than the lift. We screen ruthlessly for skills on the way in and then tolerate social behaviour on the inside that would never have got someone hired in the first place. The cost is invisible until you add up the meetings people stopped speaking in, the ideas that never made it to the table and the talent that quietly routed around the problem until they left.

So what? Well - be grateful to those team players — they’re making work better. And beware the brilliant *sshole. They’re not worth it!