Team Improvisation: Perspective Taking, Problem Formulation, and Prior Experience

Abstract

A growing number of situations require teams to improvise, especially as organizations continue to turn to teams to address their most pressing problems. Though only some teams improvise successfully, little is known about what leads some to improvise better than others, while even less is known about the role of prior experience in improvisational performance. These gaps prohibit the implementation of beneficial interventions that could prepare organizations for dynamic and unpredictable events, such as crises. To address these questions, I present the results of two studies: first, an inductive qualitative study conducted with actors working at an improvisational theater, from which I generated a series of hypotheses; and second, a field experiment with improvisational teams conducted at the theater in which I tested the hypotheses. The qualitative data suggest that teams with high perspective-taking members are better able to realize when problems are presented and to actively design them based on the team’s strengths. Manipulating team composition in the subsequent experiment, I find that teams composed of high perspective-taking individuals were more emergently interdependent, made better use of members’ prior improvisational experience, and performed better than low perspective-taking teams.