A new study by four BYU information systems professors found newly-formed work teams experienced a 20 percent increase in productivity on subsequent tasks after playing video games together for just 45 minutes<\/strong>. The study, published in\u00a0AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction<\/em>, adds to a growing body of literature finding positive outcomes of team video gaming.<\/p>\n “To see that big of a jump — especially for the amount of time they played — was a little shocking,” said co-author and BYU associate professor Greg Anderson. “Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I’m thinking, go buy an Xbox.”<\/p>\n For the study, researchers recruited 352 individuals and randomly organized them into 80 teams, making sure no participants with pre-existing relationships were on the same team. For their initial experimental task, each team played in a geocaching competition called Findamine, an exercise created by previous IS researchers which gives players short, text-based clues to find landmarks. Participants were incentivized with cash rewards for winning the competition.<\/p>\n Following their first round of Findamine, teams were randomly assigned to one of three conditions before being sent out to geocache again: 1) team video gaming, 2) quiet homework time or 3) a “goal training” discussion on improving their geocaching results. Each of these conditions lasted 45 minutes and those in the video gaming treatment chose to play either Rock Band or Halo 4 — games selected because they are both familiar and require coordinated efforts among players.<\/p>\n The researchers found that while the goal-training teams reported a higher increase in team cohesion than the video-gaming teams, the video gamers increased actual performance on their second round of Findamine significantly<\/strong>, raising average scores from 435 to 520.<\/p>\n “Team video gaming may truly be a viable — and perhaps even optimal — alternative for team building,” said lead researcher Mark Keith, associate professor of information systems at BYU.<\/p>\n Researchers also said it doesn’t matter if people are avid video gamers to see the positive effects of gaming together<\/strong>; they observed video game novices established communications norms — and built working relationships — even quicker with new teammates so as to learn the nuances of the game.<\/p>\n There is one caveat to the finding, however: the study was done with teams of individuals who don’t know each other<\/strong>. Researchers admit If team members are already familiar with each other, then competitive video gaming may possibly reinforce biases and negative relationships developed from previous experiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Brigham Young University press release: Move over trust falls and ropes courses, turns out playing video games with coworkers is the real path to better performance at the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[59,58,143,238,12,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28262,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28061\/revisions\/28262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/SocialNetwork.jpg\")
Move over trust falls and ropes courses, turns out playing video games with coworkers is the real path to better performance at the office<\/strong>.<\/p>\n