Jokey team meetings are more productive, as long as people laugh along

Science suggests a funnier workplace should be a more effective one, encouraging positive mood and a playful, open approach. But much of the evidence to date rests on theoretical argument or lab experiments. Now a new study of genuine team meetings shows that laughter begets laughter and that bouts of humour really can clear the ground for new approaches and better performance.

Using videos taken as part of an improvement process run across two German companies, the study was able to determine the flow of interactions within real team meetings. Researchers Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock and Joseph Allen found laughter was likely to follow attempts at humour - although damp squibs were also possible - and that laughter could also trigger more jokes, effectively producing humour-laughter-humour chains. This tallies with past contributions to the field that suggest humour tends to stick around when introduced.

Moments after the laughter died down from a joke, teams were more likely to engage in productive, open behaviours, such as proposing new ideas, asking questions, or offering praise or encouraging participation by others. This fits with the broaden-and-build model of positive states, where a good mood opens us up to other people and different ideas - all useful in a collaborative context.

These behaviours appear to contribute to longer-term performance, according to ratings given by team supervisors post-meeting and two years on. The higher the number of “humour plus laughter” incidents (but not humour or laughter alone), the better these ratings tended to be. The repeated importance of humour in tandem with laughter suggest that it’s not purely elevated mood or a quality of wannabe jokers, but a more dynamic give and take between team members that makes the difference.

We’re still in the early days of understanding humour’s effects in real work environments. This study only considered positive humour and set aside ridicule or spiteful jokes. We know from the lab that sarcasm can have surprising, even beneficial effects, but will this translate to a real-world context? Also, this study only looked at teams with members fairly long in tenure, so what about the other extreme: the consequences of a team’s first shared joke? Plenty of punchlines yet to come!

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Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., & Allen, J. (2014). How fun are your meetings? Investigating the relationship between humor patterns in team interactions and team performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99 (6), 1278-1287 DOI: 10.1037/a0038083

--Further reading--
Jokes are a serious part of business
The psychology of humour and comedy (Psychologist magazine feature)

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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How to improve collaboration in virtual teams? Members' avatar style could be key

When a team rarely gets to be in a room together, it misses out on many of the in-person subtle cues that help members make sense of their relationships. The signals that are available become more important: subtext in email messages, tone of voice on a conference call, or seemingly minor visual features. That’s why researchers have become interested in the humble avatar – the image that’s used to represent each person in a virtual interaction.

Sarah van der Land and her colleagues asked 80 three-student teams to solve a crime mystery. Although clues available to all team members pointed to one culprit, the true answer required collaboration to exchange information that was only available to individual participants. To do this, each virtual team had 40 minutes discussion time, using an online chat system where contributions were labelled with the person’s name and an avatar.

In one condition, all team members shared the same avatar (a cartoon bear icon), whereas in another condition, each team member had their own unique avatar (their photo). In a third, critical condition, each team member’s avatar consisted of what they thought was their own photo morphed with elements of their team-mates’ photos - in other words, each person’s avatar was universal but also personalised.

Teams performed better when their avatars
reflected a mix of each member and
their team-mates. Image: Van der Land et al.

After the task, groups in this morphed condition reported feeling more social attraction towards their team-mates, and this was the reason that these groups performed better, reaching the correct solution 70 per cent of the time, compared to a success rate of, at best, 50 per cent in the other conditions.

Van der Land argues that this is because generic and unique/realistic avatars both have a downside. Individualised pictures do little to create a sense of shared group membership, and although common avatars do, their lack of resemblance to us can underline our distance from a real workspace, making us feel more anonymous, likelier to emotionally disengage, and readier to shirk duties. The morphed avatar, meanwhile, gives us both group membership and a sense of presence.

We should be aware the study used an exaggerated format to prove its point. Participants believed each person’s morphed avatar reflected a mix of that person’s face with the faces of the other two team members. In truth, each team member saw the same avatar against their own name and that of their colleagues: one made up of 60 per cent their own face and 40 per cent the face of a student who didn’t actually take part in the study.

Simply put, this set-up gave participants the impression their team-mates were uncannily similar to them (to an extent that would call for an identical twin in the team), which likely played up the levels of social attraction. I would be interested to see the effect of accurate avatar blends in real teams, as well as other ways of exploring this mixed avatar approach, such as whether pairing personalised faces with standardised uniforms also generates these effects.

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van der Land, S., Schouten, A., Feldberg, F., Huysman, M., & van den Hooff, B. (2015). Does Avatar Appearance Matter? How Team Visual Similarity and Member-Avatar Similarity Influence Virtual Team Performance Human Communication Research, 41 (1), 128-153 DOI: 10.1111/hcre.12044

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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By helping other people, you'll find it easier to accept the help you need

Receiving help can sting. Admitting that others can do what you can’t and feeling indebted to them can lead to a sense of dependence and incompetence, and even resentment towards the very person who helped you. Luckily, Katherina Alvarez and Esther van Leeuwen have published some helpful research on one way to take the sting away.

Their study asked student participants to complete a series of tricky maths puzzles. If a puzzle was stumping them, assistance was available in the form of help cards supposedly written by another student more experienced with these puzzles. For some participants, these cards simply provided the solution whereas others provided hints to help the participants figure it out themselves.

The first type of help is considered "dependency-oriented", meaning the helper takes over and fixes things on the recipient’s behalf. Participants who received this type of help later rated themselves as less competent and respected, and they felt less happy about seeking the help compared to those who received hints.

Hints help you solve your own problems, so are "autonomy-oriented", and participants who got these, felt the card creator was more similar to themselves, as well as more qualified and well-intentioned. This fits with our understanding that dependency-oriented help carries a higher risk of negative reactions.

Alvarez and Van Leeuwen went on to show how recipients of help can bounce back. In a second stage of the study, participants tackled another set of puzzles and were invited to write help cards for three they had answered correctly, for the benefit of future participants. With this shift from help-receiver to helper, all participants reported an increase in confidence, as well as more affinity for their previous helper.

But paying it forward was especially important for those who had previously received dependency-oriented help. Their confidence received a bigger boost, and their affinity to the person helping them jumped up – even though they were not directly repaying the debt to that person. Simply taking a role within a chain of benefactors was enough to instill a sense of re-empowerment. It also turns out that knowing in advance that they would be helping others, made participants more relaxed in the first part of the study – participants given this information were more comfortable with receiving help and had warmer feelings towards the card creator.

We know that systems where help is passed forward can be very effective, for example in propagating health information from professionals on through relays of peers. This research shows us there is also a powerful psychological benefit. Harnessing this could help prevent situations where those deeply in need of support are reluctant to take it.

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Alvarez, K., & van Leeuwen, E. (2015). Paying it forward: how helping others can reduce the psychological threat of receiving help Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45 (1), 1-9 DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12270

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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