Thinking Through the Screen: A Practice-Based View of Collective Intelligence in Digital Teams

Sammanfattning

Background: The widespread adoption of digital collaboration technologies has transformed how teams communicate and coordinate across time and space. Despite this shift, effective collective performance in distributed teams cannot be explained by technology alone, and limited research has examined how collective intelligence (CI) is enacted through everyday interaction in digitally mediated environments. Purpose: This study explores how interaction practices shape collective intelligence in digital teams. The main goal is to understand the mechanisms through which distributed teams enact group-level cognition and provide guidance for managing collaboration in hybrid and digital work settings. Method: This study is based on an abductive qualitative research approach drawing on an embedded multiple-case study. Our data sample consists of eight organizations operating in hybrid and digital work environments in Sweden. In total, we conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with employees across different roles, teams, and organizational contexts, all with direct experience of digitally mediated collaboration. Conclusion: Based on our findings, we identified that collective intelligence in digital teams is shaped by three interdependent dimensions of interaction practices: discursive, structural, and relational. Discursive practices shape how teams communicate and reason together, structural practices maintain coordination and shared awareness across distance, and relational practices foster the trust and psychological safety needed for open contribution. These findings indicate that high-performing digital teams are not defined by the tools they use, but by the interaction practices they develop around them.