SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowships SPRF-IBSS: Leveraging the Power of Interactional Synchrony to Optimize Output and process for Diverse Groups and Teams

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project's objective is to fill a critical need in the social sciences to learn how to leverage the incredible value of diverse workgroups while mitigating the cost which inevitably accompanies workforce diversity. On one hand, diverse teams (e.g., content diversity as well as racial, gender and economic background diversity) are superior for innovation, creativity, and rational decision-making. By bringing to the table an array of backgrounds, experience, knowledge, and skills, diverse teams overall produce sharper performance outcomes. On the other hand, they are inefficient, full of interpersonal and taskbased conflict, and their ability to narrow-in and resolve conflict is severely limited. Thus, organizations sometimes shy away from diversity because of all the trouble it brings. What if there was a way to leverage the incredible and unique and powerful value of diversity while mitigating all of its costs? How do we unlock the potential of a diverse team to be greater than the sum of its parts? Intellectual Merit: This research hypothesizes that a simple and cheap, yet theoretically deep and fairly well-understood behavioral manipulation-interactional synchrony (i.e., all team members speaking and/or moving in-time with one another for a short period)-may have the power to finely-tune a highly diverse team into one which functions with the social benefits of a cohesive homogeneous team. In particular, synchrony is hypothesized to tackle the detriments typical of diverse teams (i.e., increase efficiency, increase liking, and reduce conflict), and combine it with the innovation and rationality already typical of such teams. Using a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate the subtle, but powerful effects of interactional synchrony, this work promises to help businesses and organizations better understand which minimal conditions are needed to help increase the effectiveness and lower conflict on diverse groups and teams. This project's research plan takes an interdisciplinary leap to hypothesize in 4 laboratory studies that synchronous movements in diverse teams work to align the collection of diverse cognitions, thereby positioning such teams to unlock the goodness their diverging perspectives have to offer. In addition, two field studies examine synchrony in campus student organizations and neighboring public school classrooms to complement the laboratory studies, advance theory, and test generalizability. Broader Impacts: The really broad impact of the research and training plan centers on how interactional synchrony is a transformative way of leveraging team diversity. Results of this research offer real and practical insight for not only business organizations and human resource managers, but also other significant decision-making groups, including government administrations, executive committees, education planners, and health administration teams.