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challenging discussions take place and the pool of ideas can be enlarged will a
group achieve its potential. Collective intelligence occurs when a group can outper-
form other groups across a multiplex of tasks, e.g., tasks involving superior moral
judgment, brainstorming, complex problem solving, conflict resolution, and so on.
Groups with collective intelligence (CI) are more diverse; in fact, one study found
that the higher the proportion of women in a group, the greater the collective intel-
ligence [ 62 ]. Groups with CI have superior social sensitivity and equal participa-
tion—i.e., no one dominates [ 62 , 63 ]. Groups displaying CI find the areas of
agreement and allow the sources of disagreement to be aired.
The third theory, fair process leadership, has several characteristics [ 35 , 36 ]. Fair
process engages key people to analyze the situation, resulting in a framing of the
decision. Fair process also explores and narrows the list of new ideas, explains the
rationale for decisions, sets expectations about roles and responsibilities, and imple-
ments strategy with an eye toward evaluation and learning [ 13 , 58 ].
The fourth important concept that underlies leadership is goal theory [ 40 ]. The
dirty secret of leadership is that if leaders can get people committed to a goal, these
people will adjust their effort level to accommodate the difficulty of the task. If
people are able, motivated, and believe the goals are important and possible to
achieve, the more challenging the goal, the better the performance. Performance
drops if people are not committed to the goal, or the wrong tools or task strategies
are used, or if they reach the limits of their abilities.
Here is where we can connect fair process with goal theory. Studies of leadership
have found that commitment to strategic goals is directly related to the perception that
a process was fair, even if decision makers disagree with the final outcome or alterna-
tive selected. Commitment to strategic goals means that the key people are drawn to the
strategic goals because they believe the strategy is important; moreover, they will per-
severe to implement the strategic activity even when there are severe constraints [ 40 ].
How to Build Commitment to Goals
The most important lesson to teach surgeons is how to build commitment to goals.^25
Goal theory teaches us that commitment means that people believe that the goal is
not only important and attractive, but also possible to attain. If people are commit-
ted, they will stick to the goal even in the face of setbacks and disruptive events. My
research on effective leaders revealed that there is a clear pattern to overall effective
leadership which requires building commitment in critical situations. Some exam-
ples of critical situations follow [ 9 , 10 ].
- Taking charge of an organization as a new assignment
(^25) I am grateful to Dr. Mitch Rabkin, MD; Dr. Michael Jellinek, MD; Reverend Jeffrey Brown; and
Maestro Wolfgang Heinzel for allowing me to observe them in situ, to study their leadership styles
to learn how they built commitment to goals. I am grateful to my colleague at INSEAD, Dr. Paul
Evans, for discussing his framework for building commitment to goals with me.
J.A. Chilingerian