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A growing body of the literature shows the influence of cognitive styles, which capture the ways individuals share, encode, and process information, and their implications for collaboration. We build on this literature to investigate the special contributions of individuals with cognitive style versatility, or facility in more than one cognitive style, for improving teams' collaborative performance. In two studies, including a total of 452 participants in 132 teams, we observe that the presence of cognitively versatile individuals has direct (Study 1) and indirect (Study 2) effects on team performance. In an exploratory analysis, we observe that the presence of cognitively versatile individuals facilitates the task and social processes necessary for effective team information processing, specifically reducing team process conflict and task conflict and enhancing team social integration, with social integration mediating the relationship between cognitive style versatility and team performance. Importantly, these effects remain even when accounting for team cognitive ability and other measures of team surface- and deep-level diversity. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on team composition and its implications for collaboration and teamwork. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Collective intelligence (CI) is critical to solving many scientific, business, and other problems, but groups often fail to achieve it. Here, we analyze data on group performance from 22 studies, including 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our results support the conclusion that a robust CI factor characterizes a group's ability to work together across a diverse set of tasks. We further show that CI is predicted by the proportion of women in the group, mediated by average social perceptiveness of group members, and that it predicts performance on various out-of-sample criterion tasks. We also find that, overall, group collaboration process is more important in predicting CI than the skill of individual members., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.