Date: Thursday 14th April
Location: Town Hall Committee Room 3
Time: 12:00-13:00
Title: "Followership and the Emergence of Leadership"
Traditional leadership theories in psychology focus on traits
and behavioural styles of leaders. Newer approaches award strong situational
contingency to leadership. Remarkably, traditional and newer psychological
approaches neglected the impact of followers on leadership. In contrast,
biological leadership theory, with its strong focus on open behaviour,
incorporates follower behaviour and associated feedbacks on leaders.
Our aim is to contribute a novel approach that connects both
disciplines showing how leaders in a human group emerge and how they depend on
followership. We use an experimental paradigm - the HoneyComb© computer-based
multi-client game (Boos, Pritz, Lange & Belz, 2014) - where initiating of
and leading as well as following in a group’s collective movement can be
measured.
We investigated ten-person-groups moving on a virtual
playfield where each participant was represented as an avatar. We ran several
experiments in order to compare the impact of different situational conditions
on the leader-follower behaviour of participants.
Our method was to determine whether group members showed
leader- or follower profiles (L-F profiles) during group movement, whether
these profiles can be clearly defined and whether individuals switch their
behaviour from leading to following and vice versa during group movement.
Boos, M., Pritz, J., Lange, S. & Belz, M. (2014).
Leadership in moving human group. PLOS Computational Biology. http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003541
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