EMOTIONAL ALIGNMENT IN TEAMS: HOW EMOTIONS SUPPORT THE DESIGN PROCESS
DS 48: Proceedings DESIGN 2008, the 10th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Year: 2008
Editor: Marjanovic D., Storga M., Pavkovic N., Bojcetic N.
Author: de Boer, R. J.; Badke-Schaub, P.
Section: Teamwork in design
Page(s): 1079 - 1086
Abstract
We propose as central theme of this paper that design team performance is affected primarily by a simultaneous occurrence of emotion in individual team members. That is, a design team will perform better (all other things being equal) if the emotional arousal of one team member is transferred to the other team members, for instance through heated debate. We have defined the term Emotional Alignment to describe the state of simultaneous emotional arousal in a team. To support this thesis, we first discuss evidence from design literature and literature case studies. We then demonstrate the likelihood of such a relation through recent exploratory research.
Keywords: teams, emotions, performance, team mental models