Business Brains 2021 Review

I have reported on plenty of topics in business – there were many from decision-making to diversity issues, to leadership, to change.

Research into business brains and behaviour was large and wide and I reported on numerous studies over 2021. One topic that generates a lot of interest is that of leadership and particularly of effective teams.

Effective Teams

There were a number of independent pieces of research that gave a lot of support to what we know makes for effective teams in business. One particularly impressive research into 48 teams from 5 Canadian startups by Brykman and King showed that those leaders who encouraged on-the-job-learning, and of note, also enabled and encouraged employees to speak up and give their ideas and suggestions for change, were more effective and more resilient.

Another meta-analysis of 22 studies of team effectiveness, published in May by Riedl et al. with the great title of “Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups” and including studies with 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups showed this: