Building the emotional intelligence of groups

The management world knows by now that to be effective in the workplace, an individual needs high emotional intelligence. What isn't so well understood is that teams need it, too. Citing such companies as IDEO, Hewlett-Packard, and the Hay Group, the authors show that high emotional intelligence is at the heart of effective teams. These teams behave in ways that build relationships both inside and outside the team and that strengthen their ability to face challenges. High group emotional intelligence may seem like a simple matter of putting a group of emotionally intelligent individuals together. It's not. For a team to have high EI, it needs to create norms that establish mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity, and a sense of group efficacy. These three conditions are essential to a team's effectiveness because they are the foundation of true cooperation and collaboration. Group EI isn't a question of dealing with a necessary evil--catching emotions as they bubble up and promptly suppressing them. It's about bringing emotions deliberately to the surface and understanding how they affect the team's work. Group emotional intelligence is about exploring, embracing, and ultimately relying on the emotions that are at the core of teams.     

Improving Work Incentives and Incomes for Parents: The National and Geographic Impact of Liberalising the Family Tax Benefit Income Test*

The effective tax rates and possible work disincentives created by Australia’s tax and welfare systems have been receiving extensive policy attention in recent years. Family Tax Benefit‐Part A (FTB‐A) is one of the key causes of high effective marginal tax rates for many families. This study uses national and spatial microsimulation models to evaluate the national and local impacts of a possible FTB‐A reform option, which involves reducing the income test withdrawal rate associated with the FTB‐A income test. The modelling suggests that the option would be an effective way to reduce high effective marginal tax rates for around 415,000 parents of FTB‐A children, would benefit around 850,000 families, and would deliver additional assistance to middle income families living on the outskirts of our cities.     

Projecting World Economic Growth: The Contribution of Information Technology

This paper introduces a new framework for projecting potential world economic growth, taking into account the critical contribution of information and technology. We apply this framework to project the potential growth of labor productivity, GDP, and per capita GDP over the ten-year period 2006-2016 for 122 economies. Relative to historical growth for the period 1996-2006, our base-case projections are slightly higher for productivity growth, but lower for growth of GDP and GDP per capita. By comparison with the World Bank forecasts, our projections are less optimistic for all groups of economies except for Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our projections are also below the Goldman Sachs forecasts for all economies except for the U.S.