The Effects Of Appointed And Emerging Leader On Members’ Interaction During Group Brainstorming

Although brainstorming techniques are widely applied to foster group creativity,researchers had found the ‘productivity loss’ phenomenon in group brainstorming.Thus,it’s necessary to explore the factors that affecting the group efficiency,especially the interaction among the group members.Leaders have significant impacts on team effectiveness.In daily life,a group leader could be appointed or emerging.Our study used f NIRS-based hyperscanning technology to explore how appointed and emerging leader affect leader-follower creative performance,interaction pattern and interpersonal brain synchronization(IBS)during group brainstorming in two separate experiments.In study 1,one participant in a three-person group were appointed to be the leader before the task.In study 2,the leader was selected by group members after the task.During each experiment,participants were required to complete a creative and a noncreative brainstorming task.In the meantime,the f NIRS equipment was used to record the brain activity in the right temporal-parietal region of three subjects simultaneously.The results of study 1 showed that,in the case of appointed leader,the creative performance of the leader and follower had no significant difference,while the cooperation level between leader-follower(LF)pairs was significantly lower than follower-follower(FF)pair.Moreover,the IBS for the LF pairs was significantly lower than that for the FF pairs in the right parietal region during creative task.These results demonstrated that randomly appointing one group member to be the leader didn’t affect his or her creative performance in a short period of time.However,the leader might less consider the ideas generated by the followers,and followers had more active interaction in comparison.The results of study 2 found that,in the case of emerging leader,the creative performance of the leader was significantly higher than the followers.In addition,the IBS for the LF pairs was significantly lower than that for the FF pairs in the angular gyrus during both creative and non-creative tasks,while the IBS for the LF pairs was significantly higher than that for the FF pairs in the superior temporal gyrus during creative task.These results indicated that the member who could generate more original ideas would be the emerging leader.Unfortunately,it might be hard for the followers to understand and utilize those creative ideas generated by the leader.In conclusion,both the appointed and the emerging leaders had a relatively low level of information exchange with the followers during group brainstorming,indicating that the leaders might have a negative effect on the interaction process between the group members at the stage of creative idea generation.