Teleconferencing and Leadership Emergence

An attempt was made to assess the role of medium of communication on leadership differentiation in discussion groups. Groups of undergraduates met on five different occasions to solve human relations problems, either in face-to-face discussion situations or over video conferencing networks. In face-to-face conditions development of leadership took almost a classic form, with sociometric measures systematically related to behavioral indexes; in the video (teleconference) conditions, role differentiation tendencies were sharply curtailed, and the relationship of sociometric indexes with indexes of verbal output were greatly diminished. Speculations about how mediated communication may affect differentiation processes are offered.

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