Anita Woolley

Anita Woolley is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. Her passion is in figuring out what makes great teams tick.

This fascination of hers started with a simple observation: Why do some groups outperform others, even when they don’t have the smartest people in the room? This question led to her groundbreaking research on collective intelligence, first published in Science in 2010, which revealed that a team’s success isn’t about stacking it with high-IQ individuals. Instead, it comes down to something much harder to quantify: how well they work together.

Woolley’s latest research pushes this idea even further into the digital age. With funding from DARPA and the National Science Foundation, she is exploring how artificial intelligence fits into the mix. How do humans and AI collaborate effectively? Can machines enhance teamwork rather than replace it? She tackles these questions in real-world experiments with teams operating in high-stakes environments.

Anita Woolley’s insights impact corporate strategy to crisis response. She has shown that adding more women to a group tends to boost collective intelligence—not because of gender itself, but because women, on average, score higher in social sensitivity, a key ingredient for effective collaboration. She also found that people vastly overestimate their ability to predict which teams will succeed, often focusing on the wrong factors.

As a senior editor at Organisation Science and a founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence, Anita Woolley is shaping the way we think about teamwork in an era where collaboration is increasingly hybrid, asynchronous, and AI-assisted.