Variance in Group Ability to Transform Resources into Performance, and the Role of Coordinated Attention

Theory on group performance has long suggested that groups exhibit variance in their ability to transform resources into performance, but empirical approaches have typically examined the average effects of resources, thereby masking such group-specific variance. In this paper, we take advantage of a large panel data set within the context of retail-banking sales groups, along with an econometric method used and advocated for in strategy research (a random coefficient model), to explore whether groups exhibit variance in the extent to which they transform resources into performance. We discover that groups do differ in the returns they achieve to resources, and they do so systematically—returns to one resource correlate with returns to another. These results indicate a latent, general ability to transform resources, one that we find is associated with a group’s coordinated attention (manifest in “bursty” email communication patterns). We suggest that the discovered general ability reflects collective intelligence, and we discuss implications of our findings for research on collective intelligence, as well as the implications of our approach for surfacing new phenomena currently masked by the dominant focus on average effects.