A novel approach to studying the role influence plays in team collective intelligence

Studying collective intelligence in teams poses key challenges because individual contributions to team outcomes—such as ideas—can be abstract and difficult to measure. Although many studies have examined how team members shape collective outputs, they often utilize measures of influence focused on perceptions, participation, or performance, which can differ from objective measures of how team member contributions shape team outcomes. In this study, we develop an objective influence measure within the context of an open-ended design task. We operationalized influence as the objective similarity between designs created in an independent Brainstorming Phase and subsequent collaborative (or independent) Design Phase. We demonstrate our measure’s validity by establishing its ability to reflect similarities between designs beyond those expected due to chance and by examining its correlation with predictors and proxies of influence. Key takeaways are that team members’ initial ideas influenced team-level designs greater than expected, especially for team members with greater expertise, more work contributions, and ideas that were more similar to the mean. Our approach demonstrates our measure’s utility in enabling a mechanistic understanding of idea integration within teams, and we discuss how it can foster new insights within the field of collective intelligence.