Priming Activity to Increase Interpersonal Closeness, Inter-Brain Coherence, and Team Creativity Outcome

Organizational research demonstrates that team interpersonal closeness enhances team performance and creativity. Design thinking practitioners and educators have adopted the concepts of interpersonal closeness and developed priming activities to propel subsequent creative-innovation tasks. In recent years, it has become paramount that these activities are effective in in-person and virtual (Zoom®) interaction settings. In this chapter, we present a design thinking (DT) activity to increase interpersonal closeness in in-person and virtual teams. We derived the DT activity from a Nonviolent Communication exercise frequently used to increase interpersonal closeness between individuals. In an empirical study (N = 72 participants, N = 36 dyads), we assessed whether the DT activity increased interpersonal closeness compared to two control tasks (i.e., a problem-solving and a creative-innovation task). Dyad partners engaged in either an in-person or virtual interaction group throughout the experiment (between-subject design). We also captured inter-brain signatures between dyad partners with portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging during the entire study. Results show that the DT activity increased interpersonal closeness in the in-person and virtual groups compared to the control tasks. We identified a distinct inter-brain signature in the right frontocortical region linked to the DT activity. Notably, this inter-brain signature differed between in-person and virtual groups. This finding suggests that conducting the DT activity in person may be more conducive to this prosocial inter-brain coherence pattern than the virtual interaction setting. Finally, preliminary results (N = 12 dyads) suggest that the DT activity increased performance in a subsequent creative-innovation task. Future research needs to confirm this hypothesis.