Interactivity Communication and Trust: Further Studies of Leadership in the Electronic Age

摘要

Successful leadership and team performance are built on a foundation of trust and effective communication between and among leaders and team members. A broad range of new communication technologies, now ubiquitous in today's military, allow leaders and their teams to work remotely from one another. Our current research program, consisting of 11 laboratory and field experiments, seeks to answer the question of how these technologies affect leaders' ability to foster high trust, morale, and performance with their team by testing the principle of interactivity: whether messages sent and received are coherently and tightly linked, create coordinated communication, and are marked by involvement, mutuality (sense of connection, receptivity, common ground, mutual understanding), and individuation (clear and detailed knowledge of sender and receiver identities). Proximal, real-time, and multi-sensory message exchange technologies promote interactivity. We have continued to investigate which forms of electronic communication help or hinder interactivity, as well as whether task load-the degree to which a task is cognitively and/or physically effortful and demanding-alters interactivity and trust. Our results offer best communication practices that will help leaders maximize trust when needed, dampen interactivity and trust when skepticism is needed, and prevent unintended negative consequences when using electronic media.