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

这个项目的目标是满足社会科学中的一个关键需求，即学习如何利用不同工作组的难以置信的价值，同时降低不可避免地伴随着劳动力多样性的成本。一方面，多样化的团队(例如，内容多样性以及种族、性别和经济背景的多样性)在创新、创造力和理性决策方面更具优势。通过将一系列的背景、经验、知识和技能带到谈判桌上，不同的团队总体上产生了更敏锐的业绩成果。另一方面，他们效率低下，充满了人际冲突和基于任务的冲突，缩小范围和解决冲突的能力受到严重限制。因此，组织有时会回避多样性，因为它带来了所有的麻烦。如果有一种方法可以利用多样性令人难以置信的、独特的和强大的价值，同时降低其所有成本，情况会怎样？我们如何释放多样化团队的潜力，使之超越其各部分的总和？智力价值：这项研究假设，一种简单、廉价、但在理论上深刻、相当容易理解的行为操纵--互动同步(即所有团队成员在短时间内相互交谈和/或同步)--可能有能力将一个高度多样化的团队微调为一个具有凝聚力的同质团队的社会效益团队。特别是，同步性被假设为解决不同团队典型的不利因素(即提高效率、增加喜好和减少冲突)，并将其与此类团队已经具有的创新和理性相结合。使用多学科方法研究交互同步的微妙但强大的影响，这项工作有望帮助企业和组织更好地了解需要哪些最低限度的条件来帮助提高效率并减少不同团队和团队的冲突。该项目的研究计划在4项实验室研究中实现了跨学科的飞跃，假设不同团队中的同步运动有助于对齐不同认知的集合，从而定位这些团队以释放他们不同的视角所提供的好处。此外，两项实地研究考察了校园学生组织和邻近公立学校教室中的同步性，以补充实验室研究、推进理论和测试通用性。更广泛的影响：研究和培训计划真正广泛的影响集中在互动同步如何成为利用团队多样性的变革性方法。这项研究的结果不仅为商业组织和人力资源经理提供了真实而实用的见解，而且还为其他重要的决策群体，包括政府行政部门、执行委员会、教育规划者和卫生管理团队提供了真实和实用的见解。

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.