Expertise

Topics:  Remote Work, Team Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Organizational Psychology, Cognitive Style, Social Perceptiveness, Group Diversity‎

Industries: Telecommunications

Anita Williams Woolley is an organizational psychologist who studies team collaboration in the workplace and collective intelligence, including how technology and artificial intelligence can help organizations collaborate more effectively. She also studies best practices for remote work and the ways that different individual characteristics, such as cognitive style and social perceptiveness, as well as group diversity enhance team collective intelligence.

Media Experience

How to convince your U.S. employer to let you work abroad  — Fast Company
Anita Williams Woolley (Tepper School of Business) discussed the benefits of working abroad in this piece that advocates for U.S. employers to allow their employees to do just that: “Organizations should actually encourage more of it. When you have individuals who have experience in multiple cultures, they contribute a tremendous amount to facilitating the work of any team that they’re on, whether those teams all share that same cultural experience or not,” Woolley said.

The workers quitting over return-to-office policies  — BBC
"I'm not at all surprised – in fact, I'm surprised it took this long" for an executive at a high-profile company to quit over return-to-office, says Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organisational behaviour and theory at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, US. She says senior leaders at businesses she works with have all been "kind of watching each other to see who's going to do what first, and what the reaction is going to be" to tapering off remote work. "Now, they're getting the reaction."

6 ways to restructure IT for maximum productivity  — CIO Magazine
Stop scheduling standing meetings, urges Anita Williams Woolley, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “Make asynchronous updates and discussions the default,” she advises.

Collective intelligence can be predicted and quantified, new study finds  — Phys Org
"This paper introduces some computational metrics for evaluating collaboration processes that could be foundational for studying collaboration moving forward," says Anita Williams Woolley, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, who co-authored the paper. "We also continue to find that having more women in the group raises collective intelligence, and in the supplement we specifically compare face-to-face and online collaborators and find few differences in the elements that lead to collective intelligence."

Zoom is actually less effective than a phone call for these types of meetings  — Fast Company
“We found that video conferencing can actually reduce collective intelligence,” says coauthor Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “This is because it leads to more unequal contribution to conversation and disrupts vocal synchrony. Our study underscores the importance of audio cues, which appear to be compromised by video access.”

Research round-up: making the most of top female staff  — Financial Times
“Gender diversity benefits do not materialise if the atmosphere is too cut-throat,” says Anita Williams Woolley, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who led the research.