Thereʼs no ʻIʼ in ʻEmergency Management Team:ʼ designing and evaluating a serious game for training emergency managers in group decision making skills

Serious games are games that are designed to educate rather than entertain. The game outlined and evaluated here was commissioned and designed as a tool to improve the group decision making skills of people who manage real-world emergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemical spills. The game design exploits research on decision making groups and applies pedagogically sound games design principles. An evaluation of the game design was carried out based on a paper prototype. Eight participants were recruited and assigned to two groups of four participants each. These groups were video recorded while playing the game and the video was analysed in terms of game actions and member participation. Results indicate that the group who behaved in a more appropriate manner for a decision making group were rewarded with more positive feedback from the game state. These findings suggest that the game itself delivers appropriate feedback to players on their collaborative behaviour and is thus fit for the purposes intended in the current project

Building an Ethical Small Group (Chapter 9 of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership)

This chapter examines ethical leadership in the small-group context. To help create groups that brighten rather than darken the lives of participants, leaders must foster individual ethical accountability among group members, ensure ethical group interaction, avoid moral pitfalls, and establish ethical relationships with other groups. In his metaphor of the leader\u27s light or shadow, Parker Palmer emphasizes that leaders shape the settings or contexts around them. According to Palmer, leaders are people who have an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being, conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 1 In this final section of the text, I\u27ll describe some of the ways we can create conditions that illuminate the lives of followers in small-group, organizational, global, and crisis settings. Shedding light means both resisting and exerting influence. We must fend off pressures to engage in unethical behavior while actively seeking to create healthier moral environments

The impact of Group Intelligence software on enquiry-based learning

Despite the increasing use of groupware technologies in education, there is little evidence of their impact, especially within an enquiry-based learning (EBL) context. In this paper, we examine the use of a commercial standard Group Intelligence software called GroupSystems®ThinkTank. To date, ThinkTank has been adopted mainly in the USA and supports teams in generating ideas, categorising, prioritising, voting and multi-criteria decision-making and automatically generates a report at the end of each session. The software was used by students carrying out an EBL project, set by employers, for a full academic year. The criteria for assessing the impact of ThinkTank on student learning were those of creativity, participation, productivity, engagement and understanding. Data was collected throughout the year using a combination of interviews and questionnaires, and written feedback from employers. The overall findings show an increase in levels of productivity and creativity, evidence of a deeper understanding of their work but some variation in attitudes towards participation in the early stages of the project

Student Perception of Social Loafing in University Teamwork

This study investigated perceptions of social loafing in undergraduate student teams at a South African university. Student participants, randomly assigned to teams, received coursework instruction about team dynamics (including social loafing) and worked together for 12 weeks on a team assignment that was graded at the end of the semester. Students (n = 243) wrote individual reflections on the reasons for social loafing in student teams. Some (n = 24) also participated in an experiential social loafing exercise. These two sources of qualitative data were used in the development of a survey questionnaire, which was completed by 229 students. Fifty-four percent of the student participants (n = 229) perceived social loafing to have occurred in their teams. Four components of perceived social loafing behaviour were identified using factor analysis: unavailability, poor work quality, tech loafing and discussion non-contribution. Loafer apathy (a general lack of care or interest) predicted significant variance in each of the four loafing behaviours and social compensation. Team performance (assignment grades) was not related to the perceived presence social loafing in a team. Rather than reducing effort in response to perceived social loafing (the sucker effect), a social compensation effect occurred in the perceived presence of poor work quality. Effective leadership moderated the relationship between loafer apathy and tech loafing as well as loafer apathy and social compensation. Practical implications and recommendations for future research are presented

Mechanisms Underlying Social Loafing in Technology Teams: An Empirical Analysis

Prior research has identified team size and dispersion as important antecedents of social loafing in technology-enabled teams. However, the underlying mechanisms through which team size and team dispersion cause individuals to engage in social loafing is significantly understudied and needs to be researched. To address this exigency, we use Bandura’s Theory of Moral Disengagement to explain why individuals under conditions of increasing team size and dispersion engage in social loafing behavior. We identify three mechanisms—advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility and moral justification —that mediate the relationship between team size, dispersion and social loafing. Herein, we present the theory development and arguments for our hypotheses. We also present the initial findings from this study. Implications of the expected research findings are also discussed

Social Loafing Construct Validity in Higher Education: How Well Do Three Measures of Social Loafing Stand Up to Scrutiny?

The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validity of social loafing using convergent and discriminant validity principles. Three instruments that purport to measure social loafing were factor analyzed: A ten-item instrument by George (1992), a 13-item instrument by Mulvey and Klein (1998), and a 22-item instrument by Jassawalla, Sashittal, and Malshe (2009) for a total of 45 items that were compiled into a single instrument with which data were collected, correlated, and factor analyzed. One hundred and sixty graduate and undergraduates enrolled in management courses at a small private Northern California university were surveyed. Thirteen classes were surveyed and data was collected over three semesters. Data collected were factor analyzed using Principle Axis Factoring and rotated using Promax with Kappa = 4 for each instrument. Correlations, Keyser-Meyer-Olkin, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity were inspected for reasonable factorability, sampling adequacy, and appropriateness of running a factor analysis. Eigenvalues \u3e 1 and Scree plots supported the number of factors extracted with primary factor loadings of .4 or higher. Pattern, structure, and factor correlation matrices were inspected for content, loadings, and correlations among the derived factors. Derived factors were compared to each author’s theoretical framework. Additionally, the eight derived factors were factor analyzed using the same procedures. The result was three final derived factors. Findings showed correlations among the author’s scales indicated that the three instruments do not measure the same thing. George’s and Jassawalla et al.’s instruments share 55% of the variance. Mulvey and Klein’s instrument shares little in common with Jassawalla et al. and virtually nothing with George. Further, George, Mulvey and Klein, and Jassawalla et al. had hypothesized10 scales whereas my factoring had eight factors. Findings showed that the 8-factor solution supported George, partially supported Mulvey and Klein, and did not support Jassawalla et al. The final 3-factor solution does help to define the social loafing construct. The findings suggest using the instruments with caution. Further research to ensure accurate conceptualizations of the social loafing construct should be continued

Sociopsychotechnological Predictors of Individual’s Social Loafing in Virtual Team

The rapid development of technology and the demands of the workers to be productive have made efficiency and effectiveness of virtual team collaboration is becoming increasingly urgent lately. Therefore, it is important to identify the variables undermining the efficiency and effectiveness. This study aimed to investigate the role of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived playfulness of online collaboration tool (as elements of technology acceptance) and xenophobia in predicting social loafing (at the individual level)─a social psychological phenomenon that shows the declining performance of the individual when working in the group. The contribution of this research is its attempt to combine social psychological and technological factors in explaining human performance in the context of the group when interacting with technology. The research design was correlational predictive, with multiple linear regression data analysis technique. Participants of this study were 80 students and employees (43 males, 37 females; mean of age = 25.58 years of old, standard deviation of age = 4.92 years) who work using online collaboration tool in a virtual team. The results showed that the perceived playfulness, perceived ease of use, and xenophobia were able to predict an individual’s social loafing, but the perceived usefulness is not able to predict it. Implications of the results of research in order to prevent social loafing are stated in the Discussion section

How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ‘‘around-the-table’’ form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The ‘‘aroundthe-table’’ form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task