The landscape of business management and education practices is evolving rapidly, driven by the increasing complexity of the global business environment. Today, business schools emphasize the importance of integrating real-world projects, internships, and hands-on activities to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. In particular, there is growing interest in utilizing games, gamification, and role-playing scenarios to replicate real-world challenges, allowing students to practice leadership, decision-making, and crisis management in a controlled environment.
Most current efforts in gamification research have utilized collaboration and competition as mutually exclusive phenomena. In real-life settings, competition and collaboration often occur simultaneously during teamwork. For example, teammates often collaborate to compete against other teams. Also, different motivational orientations, as well as disagreements and conflicts may trigger competition within collaborative teams. Thus, in order to improve the ecological validity of gamification research, it is important to move beyond collaboration versus competition. Therefore, the current project will utilize an experimental design that blends within-team collaboration with between-teams competition to explore the optimal balance between collaboration and competition in teamwork.
Recent research has highlighted the role of emergent leadership—i.e., leadership that arises organically and dynamically within teams—in successful business operations. However, there is limited knowledge about how emergent leadership develops during team collaboration. This project aims to address this gap by studying the temporal evolution of emergent leadership among teammates as they communicate in real-time during a gamified team task.
In organizational settings, team functioning predominantly analyzed through a lens that imposes assumptions of linearity and mechanistic causality. This provides a stark contrast with the way contemporary theories describe teamwork: as a nonlinear process, where multiple components (cognitive, motivational, social, affective) emerge over time and interact with each other in one single system. Scientific investigation of nonlinear characteristics of teamwork requires collecting data that illuminates the temporal dynamics of teamwork. Recent advances in collecting process-based multimodal data (e.g., physiological signals, log files, body gestures, and facial expressions) can be utilized for this purpose. However, the use of temporal data for understanding nonlinear nature of team social dynamics remains limited as it requires analytical paradigm shift. This project seeks to advance the field by collecting multimodal data from teammates and integration of Complex Dynamic Systems and Machine Learning methods to study nonlinear social dynamics, and emergent leadership within the business teams.
The project’s findings will enable the identification and facilitation emergent leadership through a dynamic, multilayered perspective, incorporating new and innovative methods. It will lay the foundation for developing sustainable team social dynamics and effective leadership, enabling organizations to stay competitive in a fast-changing world while maintaining strong collaboration and coordination among their members. Further, the project will have a significant impact on business education by producing an educational framework for augmenting gamified learning activities with collaborative and competitive structures.
Dr., PhD Muhterem Dindar is Assistant Professor at University of Tampere, Faculty of Education and Culture. In the 2024 grant round, Dindar was awarded 100 000 € in grant for his research group ”Gamification for Leadership Competence Development – GATE.” The project is part of the Fund’s focus area Leadership Competence.