Communication style drives emergent leadership attribution in virtual teams

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Scott M. Rennie¹  Michael Platt²  Lana Prieur³ 

[1] Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;Department of Marketing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;Department of Marketing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;

关键词: leadership selection;    virtual teams;    synchrony;    speech analysis;    facial affect;    group decision making;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1095131

 received in 2022-11-10, accepted in 2023-02-20,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Leader selection plays a key role in how human social groups are formed and maintained. Leadership is either assigned through formal processes within an organization, or emerges informally through interactions with other group members–particularly in novel contexts. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of virtual meetings and more flexible team structures. However our understanding of how assigned leadership influences subsequent leadership emergence in virtual settings is limited. Here we examine the relationship between assigned leadership within an existing organization and subsequent emergent leadership attributions as members engage in virtual interactions. To do so, we created and implemented a novel virtual group decision-making task designed to support quantification of a more comprehensive set of communication style elements, such as speech dynamics and facial expressions, as well as task behaviors. Sixteen members of a real world organization engaged four repeated rounds of a group decision making task with new team members each time. We found participants made novel attributions of emergent leadership rather than relying solely on existing assigned leadership. While assigned leadership did influence leadership attributions, communication style, including amount of speech but also variability in facial expressions, played a larger role. The behavior of these novel emergent leaders was also more consistent with expectations of leadership behavior: they spoke earlier, more often, and focused more on the correct decision than did assigned leaders. These findings suggest that, even within existing social networks, virtual contexts promote flexible group structures that depend more on communication style and task performance than assigned leadership.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Rennie, Prieur and Platt.