Increasing Group Cohesion by Manipulating Social Creativit

Many years of research have linked cohesion to a group's performance (for review see Filho, Dobersek, Gershgoren, Becker, & Tenenbaum, 2014). Due to its relationship with performance, cohesion has garnered attention over the past 30 years as a mutable component of a sports group (Pesocolido & Saaverdra, 2012). Past interventions that were successful at increasing cohesion as a proposed outcome often found it difficult to determine which of the areas from the intervention was the cause of the increase in group cohesion (Brawley & Paskevich, 1997). The current studies sought to manipulate the level of group cohesion as a means of uncovering its the antecedents. Both a collegiate student body as well as four collegiate football teams were used across 3 studies, utilizing the experimental framework from Lalonde (1992). Whereas LaLonde observed levels of social creativity from a low status sports team, this paper sought to induce social creativity with the intention of increasing team cohesion from a low status team. Three studies were conducted to build off Lalonde's assumption that collegiate athletes on low status teams with impermeable boundaries will look to change the dimension of comparison between themselves and their higher status opponents. Study 1 served as an initial examination for the proposed experiment and theoretical model and demonstrated results that were aligned with the hypothesized outcomes. In Study 2, social creativity was induced within a low-status collegiate student body however; neither the manipulation nor the model was found to be effective. Though the proposed moderated mediation model was unsuccessful, Study 3 demonstrated the effectiveness of the social creativity manipulation as a method for increasing group cohesion. The strength of this study was its ability to target the specific social mechanism that triggered an increase in group cohesion. Despite the success of the manipulation in Study 3, more research is needed to explain the lack of indirect effects for the proposed model, as well as an absence of unstable and illegitimate social boundaries.