Rhythmic Activities Facilitate Shared Leadership and Team

¶ … Rhythmic Activities

Facilitate Shared Leadership and Team Flow?

Management literature is rife with advice on how to engage teams of workers in their tasks, how to get teams to cooperate, and how to build cultural identity as a company. Historically, humans have used group rhythmic tasks to solidify affiliation in religious, cultural, and military settings (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Traditional team-building approaches have focused largely on the content or style rather than the form of team-building exercises (Midura & Glover, 2005), but new research in the shared leadership model of team dynamics suggests that formal elements that promote cognitive fluency - or "flow" - between team members produce more innovative results and heighten trust within a team (Makowski & Breman, 2008). Research on fluency shows that it is a key element in building rapport and effective shared leadership (Hooker & Czikszentmihalyi, 2003; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). This research probes the question: is rhythmic entrainment a better way to induce fluency, or a feeling of "flow" in interactions, than other methods?

This paper will propose an experimental test of rhythmic entrainment as a way to promote fluency above and beyond traditional non-rhythmic team-building tasks. First, I will explore previous literature on fluency/flow, rapport, coordination, and team leadership. Since the psychological literature on fluency has not been fully explored in organizational management circles, I will devote some time to explaining how the concept of flow is crucial to understanding successful interactions within organizations. Fluent experience is especially helpful in teams whose goals are innovative and creative, and in which a non-hierarchical or flexibly hierarchical leadership model is adopted. I will then describe an experiment that pits traditional team-building exercises aimed at increasing trust and strengthening a shared leadership model against a variant that subtly incorporates a rhythmic entrainment phase. My analysis will incorporate qualitative and quantitative outcomes derived from tasks, surveys, and a sociomap of the studied group. In my measures, I will focus on the flexibility of authority roles within the team, the growth of trust between team members, and the creativity and efficiency of their problem solutions. I will explain the resources needed for this experiment, including participants, experimental personnel, technology needs, coding, timeline, budget, and any prospective assurances or clearances needed (e.g. from the university's Institutional Research Board or a participating company). With this experiment, I hope to show the cost-effective benefit of adding a simple entrained rhythmic component to team-building exercises.

Previous Research

Previous research on flow in groups has been both theoretical and experimental. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory and Daniel Oppenheimer's Subjective Fluency Theory provide bases for the experimental intuition that flow, fluency, or that quality of experience associated with ease is central to how interactions are carried out. Separately, research on rhythmic entrainment suggests that it is as central to human experience as flow is, and may in fact be a related - or at least contributing - phenomenon (Rogers, 1994). Empirical research in this area ranges from developmental studies of the impact of rhythmic music on helping behavior and problem solving (Kirschner & Tomasello, 2008) to studies examining the impact of walking in step on choice behavior in group economic games (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Team Flow Theory, which grows out of Flow Theory through organizational behavior dynamics, proposes a detailed description of teams that experience flow, which I will discuss with respect to issues like coordination and synchrony that arise in the entrained rhythm literature.

Flow is described as "a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand." It became popular with the publication of Czikszentmihalyi's monograph on the topic in 1990, and still inspires popular authors like Malcolm Gladwell, whose "tipping point" theory can be interpreted as "Flow writ large" - the dynamics of flow on a population or organizational level. Flow is unconscious, although there are many articles and manuals devoted to teaching the reader how to intentionally achieve it in order to raise personal effectiveness on the job or in daily life. Czikszentmihalyi writes that flow is particularly prevalent in, and essential to, high-functioning teams in which a shared leadership model is used (Hooker & Czikszentmihalyi, 2003). He argues that flow augments motivation and creative outcomes, and operates well within a shared leadership structure. This structure lends itself to interconnected streams of knowledge, responsibility, and authority that are highly efficient in producing creative outcomes for temporary projects or problems. A fluid shared leadership model would not take root in a traditional Fortune 500 company except in certain divisions or departments, for example. And while flow can be a useful concept for any individual or group wishing to optimize performance, organizational restructuring with flow in mind is only appropriate in select cases.

The concept of fluency arises from literature in psychology addressing different types of fluency. In a recent review of the field, Alter and Oppenheimer write that the "tribes of fluency" should be united under one general banner for easier study. Some varieties of fluency are "objective" - for example, reading in a font color that contrasts cleanly with the background is a more fluent experience than reading in a font color that resembles or clashes with the background (Oppenheimer & Frank, 2007). However, these forms are less relevant to the Flow construct. I will be mainly concerned with what Alter and Oppenheimer term "subjective fluency": the experience of fluent action whether or not it reflects the objective ease with which conceptual or perceptual data is processed. Subjective fluency and flow are intuitively connected - flow could be re-described as a consistent, self-reinforcing sequence of fluent experiences. Fluency has basic cognitive benefits for processing and memory, but it also has implications for interactions between people. Social psychologists call the positive feeling that is built between individuals over time "rapport"; it greases the wheels of conversation and makes interactions more fluent. If subjective fluency is the cognitive backdrop for the state of flow, then increasing fluency should also positively affect the state of rapport, a feeling of ease that can lead participants to believe they are "on the same page" or "in sync" with each other. In groups or dyads, this should mean that fluent interactions can both build group rapport and lead to a profound sense of group flow. The way this fluency -> rapport -> flow process affects teams' productivity and creativity, however, remains to be seen.

Previous research suggests that physical coordination, particularly rhythmic coordination, has a number of benefits for human interactions. Within interactions, coordinated mimicry, or mirroring, noticeably improves rapport and creates a feeling of liking in the partner being mirrored. Simple physical actions like walking in step or passing a cup from left to right at the same time can promote a greater feeling of liking, more cooperative behavior, and even greater trust among group members. Research conducted by Wiltermuth and Heath showed that specific rhythmic actions - walking in step, passing a cup from left to right, and singing at the same tempo - were related to making a more cooperative choice in a public-goods game, and also with higher ratings of closeness and trust (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Unfortunately, the walking-in-step condition was poorly designed: half the participants were told to walk in step, while the other half were not given any instructions. Other research has shown that humans fall into synchronous walking patterns automatically, a phenomenon known as "frequency locking." The authors did not report the rate at which "asynchronous" groups fell into frequency-locked walking patterns, so it is impossible to tell the degree to which the groups' rhythmic behavior actually differed. Given the chance to replicate this study or reanalyze Wiltermuth and Heath's data, I might measure the speed at which groups fell into step with each other, within a close margin of error, and see if that speed was as good a predictor of cooperative behavior and liking as simple instruction-group membership. It also suggests a fluency interpretation for the cooperativity data: groups who were told to walk in step were given a trivially easy task which they could all accomplish fluently, which may have given rise to a feeling of belonging (e.g. To a group that is consciously "in sync") that affected later social behaviors and assessments.

Another study that touches on both rhythm and problem solving comes from the developmental literature. Kirschner and Tomasello conducted a study in which 5- to 7-year-old children participated in one of two directed play scenarios, and then followed by participating in several paired problem solving games (Kirschner & Tomasello, 2009). The difference between the directed play scenarios was rhythmic entrainment: in one scenario, children were instructed to play with and say hello to several toy frogs presented to them; in the second, they were directed to sing a song about the frogs and use them as percussive musical instruments. The problem solving games were meant to provoke cooperative behavior between children, and involved several simple mechanical puzzles in which collaboration solved the problem faster than independent behavior. The authors hypothesized that children in the rhythmic/musical task would be more cooperative and faster to realize the collaborative solutions. After adjusting for gender differences, the initial directed play phase had a small but significant effect on the later cooperative behavior. This was suggested by results from counts of cooperative acts, amount of time spent helping the other child, and collaborative language (e.g. uses of the word "we," question proposals as opposed to imperatives). This study, ported to an adult setting, is the basic format of the study I propose below.

An interesting perspective on flow comes from a paper by Makowski and Brennan that uses the history of the rock band the Rolling Stones as a canonical model of a team that frequently experienced flow (Makowski & Brennan, 2008). Their model identifies five key elements in collaboration within teams that have a high level of flow:

- Authentic communication

- Shared leadership

- Complementary qualities

- Shared passion

- Synergetic identity

This is a descriptive model and cannot always be mapped onto all working teams. However, their five identified elements are in concert with what we know about rapport, and suggest that the almost magical level of flow that can arise in a good team is the result of coordination that overcomes inherent differences in order to achieve a goal that all are passionate about. It is also important to have some measure by which teams can assess their own performance before and after a team-building exercise in order to solidify the value of the activity for the participants. Since flow is both an attractive research topic and a popular desideratum for knowledge workers, probing participants' perceptions of their own and their team's "flowability" will assist in relating participants' experience back to the basic notions of fluency that I articulated above.

Objectives

The objective of this study is to apply current research in social psychology and human kinematics to the business world, in an effort to improve team-building practices. More specifically, the objective is to test whether a brief rhythmic coordination task will facilitate building teams that are capable of supporting a shared leadership model with enhanced team flow dynamics, above and beyond the addition of a similar, non-rhythmic task that induces a feeling of trivial fluency among group members. This facilitation should be made possible by the increased trust in the rhythmic-fluency group compared to the fluency-only group.

Methods

Participants will be formed into teams based on their department or company; their team members will be people they work with on a daily basis. Individual team members will be asked to rate themselves and their team as a whole on Makowski and Breman's five elements of team flow. These numbers will be used in a later correlational analysis. Each team will participate in either a 10-minute rhythmic or non-rhythmic task intended to provide a fluent experience, and then they will participate in a team-building activity. The rhythmic fluency task will be, as in Wiltermuth and Heath (2009), walking in step for several minutes. The non-rhythmic fluency task will be to write out the alphabet. This should serve as a comparably easy physical task that takes place in a mutually-observed setting, yet one that probably does not lend itself to frequency locking. After completing the fluency exercise, teams will be instructed and led in a team-building exercise intended to teach principles of shared leadership and its usefulness in problem solving. Specifically, they will participate in several of the modules in Lego's "Serious Play" system (Statler, Roos & Victor, 2009). Some of these modules encourage the adoption of a shared leadership structure and require teams to generate insight-based solutions to problems. The team's performance on these problems can be assessed using tools included in the Serious Play system package. They will then be given space in separate cubicles to complete anonymous survey questionnaires about their fellow team members. Each member will be asked to describe their relationship to all 6 other members over the course of each Lego Serious Play problem in quantifiable ways.

Participants' Serious Play sessions will be audio and video recorded, and the audio transcribed verbatim. Video recordings may be used to inform the sociomap analysis' measure of closeness between team members - physical closeness can indicate social comfort between partners, and expressive gestural behavior can indicate shifts of leadership among group members that enriches the transcripts of the sessions.

Population Sample

The ideal sample population for this research would be groups in the research and engineering departments of a large, highly innovative organization - all else being equal, a company like Apple or Google that has a large enough employee base to furnish at least 8 team-building groups of 7 individuals (N = 56). The organizational structure should be one that lends itself both to shared leadership within development groups, and the concept of team flow. It may not be important that the groups all come from the same organization, but if this was possible, it would help to control for variability across groups that may be due to differences in corporate culture. Groups of 7, and odd numbered groups in general, are seen as ideal for team building exercises that test leadership structures or trust dynamics, since with an odd number, power does not easily distribute evenly between equal-sized subgroups (Midura & Glover, 2005). In order for the results of this study to be generalizeable across organizational settings, groups should be drawn from departments with different responsibilities.

Research Design

The design of this experiment is a simple between-groups comparison: measures collected from groups participating in the rhythmic task will be compared to those participating in the non-rhythmic task. Measures will include team building task outcomes (e.g. speed of solution, number of bricks re-purposed during solving stage, innovation score of solution, other measures included in Serious Play assessment pack), linguistic measures (proportion of speech by each team member), survey measures (ratings of liking, trust, ease of interaction with each other member, and degree to which other members led or shared leadership), and sociomapping results (closeness of connections and actions initiated/adopted by team members).

The use of sociomapping here is particularly apt because sociomaps can represent change in leadership structures over time (Bahbouh & Warrenfelz, 2010).Thus, we can see the evolution of leadership roles over the course of the Serious Play problem solving session and detect whether team members changed their relationships to each other, and changed their leadership status, from the beginning of the team-building session to the end. One axis of the sociomap is time, one is relational closeness between members (represented as lines on the sociomap) and the third axis represents authority. Content coding of the transcribed sessions will be required to assess whether team members' authority changed over time. Events that will be coded include: new assertions, assertion adopted, solution suggested, solution assented to, and also de-constructive moves like objecting or disagreeing with a participant's proposed construction or solution. The sociomap that each group generates will be a unique mixed-methods representation of their behavior, and can only be assessed qualitatively. The figure below is an example of a 3D sociomap. In this case, height/color indicates pull/power/agency and spatial location is represented on two axes (time is not represented). An interpretation of this sociomap would be that two high-status colleagues were standing together and two other low-status colleagues were standing off to the side of each high-status member.

Figure 1. Sociomap from QED Group, 2009. http://www.sociomap.com/

Planned Method of Analysis

Since this research is relatively simple, in most cases a 2-tailed t-test will suffice to show whether a result is statistically significant or not. If groups are seen to be significantly different from each other, then an omnibus ANOVA will be used with group number as a random factor. Scores from quantitative measures will be compared across rhythm and non-rhythm groups. For more qualitative and linguistic measures, and the generation of sociomaps, a more detailed coding analysis will be performed. Linguistic measures will be calculated from transcripts of the group's activities. Each Serious Play activity will be counted as its own event, and the proportion of each member's speech will be calculated within that window. This approach will allow for leadership changes to emerge more clearly, since in groups that are encouraged to share leadership, this leadership distribution may change radically between activities as each person's appropriate strengths are drawn out.