Anita Williams Woolley
Associate Professor
Anita Williams Woolley is an organizational psychologist who studies team collaboration in the workplace and collective intelligence.
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
Ěý— Business Insider
The return-to-office (RTO) debate is causing friction between leadership and Gen Z employees. Leaders push for in-office attendance. Gen Z workers value flexibility, autonomy, and transparency. Anita Williams Woolley (Tepper School of Business) said, "if the benefits are not that great for employees, leaders will need to decide if it's worth the staff reduction caused by RTO policies."
Ěý— 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.
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"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 Â鶹´ĺ'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."
Ěý— CIO Magazine
Stop scheduling standing meetings, urges Anita Williams Woolley, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Â鶹´ĺ’s Tepper School of Business. “Make asynchronous updates and discussions the default,” she advises.
Ěý— 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."
Ěý— 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.”
Ěý— 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.
Education
A.B., Psychology, Harvard University
A.M., Social Psychology, Harvard University
Ph.D., Organizational Behavior, Harvard University