Teaming With Ideas

Bobby Parmar, U Va professor and team behavior researcher, discusses results from his escape room study. “Teams relate through behaviors, even micro-behaviors. How a team communicates is highly predictive of their success. For example, one of the things that we find is the amount of humor, laughter on a team is highly predictive of the number of hypotheses that a team throws out when they're solving these puzzles. Laughter is one potential way of getting to psychological safety, but there's lots of ways of getting it. Psychological safety, being inclusive, being trusting, having integrity: all of those things are mechanisms by which we can draw others out and say, "your ideas matter. And I want to hear from you how to make things better.

“We found that people who spoke with certainty, struggled in the escape room. Even a little bit of certainty from someone made it a lot harder for me to say, ‘Nope, that didn't work’ because it feels like I'm judging that individual or I'm going to cause a negative emotion in that individual. And that makes it harder for the team to provide that disconfirming data and makes it difficult for the team to be effective.”