Keywords

team flow, team performance, team cohesion, collaborative video gaming

Abstract

Research on effective team work has traditionally explained team performance as a result of team cohesion and goal commitment. Team cohesion was originally defined as the general level of attraction the team members had to all others in their group. This social relations-based concept of team cohesion is generally a strong indicator of team performance. However, more recent research has stressed the importance of incorporating the team members’ mutual level of commitment to the team task as another sub-dimension of cohesion. When including task commitment, team cohesion is a somewhat weaker predictor of team performance (Beal et al., 2003). To better conceptualize the role of the task engagement and to explain team performance, we incorporate a variable more relevant to the characteristics of a team task: team flow. The concept of “flow” has been well researched and theorized at the individual level. However, in an experiment based on collaborative video gaming, we demonstrate that not only can flow be extended to the team level to better explain performance, but that teams can quickly generate a psychological flow state from low cost treatments like collaborative video gaming which can also be effectively transferred into subsequent work tasks.

Original Publication Citation

Keith, M. J., Anderson, G. Dean, D., and Gaskin, J. (2014). The effects of team flow on performance: A video game experiment. SIGHCI Pre-ICIS Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction (Pre-ICIS SIGHCI), December 14-17, Auckland, NZ.

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2014

Publisher

SIGHCI Pre-ICIS Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Business

Department

Information Systems Management

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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