Operationalizing Heedful Interrelating: How Attending, Responding, and Feeling Comprise Coordinating and Predict Performance in Self-Managing Teams

Embodied Interaffectivity in the Emergence and Maintenance of Group Cohesion

Group cohesion is an affect-laden construct, with a large body of research indicating its importance for success of teams. Surprisingly, it has received scant attention in collaborative learning contexts, and little is known about its development as dynamically emergent in the spontaneous, interdependent actions of actors during groupwork. This paper details an illustrative case analysis which took an embodied perspective to explore the role of interaffectivity in the emergence and maintenance of cohesion in one small group of university students who reported a highly positive and productive experience of collaborative science activities over a semester. The case analysis made visible group cohesion as unfolding and enactive in the myriad ephemeral and seemingly inconsequential microlevel behaviors that evolved into macro-temporal patterns of positive embodied interaffectivity, magnifying their visibility and collective impact. A fine-grained embodiment lens unveiled how participants cocreated collaborative affordances in actions that involved corporeal orientation as well as use of space, task, and other material artifacts. Task-related humor within routine task interaction offered the potential for establishing group cohesion in early group life, but also posed a potential threat to task-focused cohesiveness, requiring careful modulation at critical task points. Attentiveness not only to the task but importantly, to one another as interpersonal attentiveness, appeared to be a key factor in developing and maintaining group cohesion, also demonstrating collaborative learning as a process of orienting to and understanding tasks through one another. An embodiment lens highlighted mutual attentiveness in the ongoing orienter-orientee microprocesses that facilitated group orientation early in group life, and in reorienting to positive embodied interaffectivity when the group reconvened for their joint science activities in subsequent weeks.

Toward a pedagogy of connection: A critical view of being relational in listening

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) perspectives define interpersonal work experiences such as positive work relationships and high-quality connections by the mutual growth and empowerment experienced by relationship or connection partners. Listening has been implicated as a key mechanism for building such positive interpersonal work experiences, but it is unclear how listening spurs on mutual, rather than one-sided growth, in relationship and connection partners. In this paper, we argue that management education currently focuses on the intrapersonal capability of listeners to execute key verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Less emphasis is placed on the mutual experience co-created between speaker and listener and, thus, on the potential for mutual growth and empowerment. We articulate what “being relational” in the listening experience means, and use experiential learning theory to articulate how educators might create learning spaces for “being relational” through conversations between listener and speaker. Throughout the paper we contend with issues of individual and structural power asymmetries inherent in understanding listening as a relational process.

Individual Competencies for Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

Self-managing teams are popular but they can only benefit team performance if their members are competent to navigate within self-managing systems. Based on a systematic literature search on self-managing, self-directing, and self-leading teams, we reviewed 84 studies related to KSAOs and traits in self-managing teams. Grounded on existing models of team effectiveness and individual KSAOs, we integrated all findings into one KSAO model and showed the relations of single KSAOs with team performance. The results resembled other KSAO frameworks but were more comprehensive and provided practical application and future research guidance, for example, studying team compositions of individual KSAOs.

The sound of cooperation: Musical influences on cooperative behavior

Music as an environmental aspect of professional workplaces has been closely studied with respect to consumer behavior while sparse attention has been given to its relevance for employee behavior. In this article, we focus on the influence of music upon cooperative behavior within decision-making groups. Based on results from two extended 20-round public goods experiments, we find that happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior. We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior. Consequently, while our studies provide partial support for the relevance of affect in relation to cooperation within groups, we also show an independently important function of happy music that fits with a theory of synchronous and rhythmic activity as a social lubricant. More generally, our findings indicate that music and perhaps other atmospheric variables that are designed to prime consumer behavior might have comparably important effects for employees and consequently warrant closer investigation.