Originality in Group Productivity. IV. Studies of the Effects of Sponsorship and Strategy upon the Actor's Independence and upon the Social Assessment of His Productivity,

Abstract

Identifer: Creativity, Originaity, Poductivity. This report describes two pairs of experiments desgned to test the sponsor and strategy hypotheses. The results show the expected effect of sponsorship in increasing the variability of the responses of unselected subjects (Ss). Contrary to prediction, the sponsored Ss more frequently emerged as the most highly valued members of their groups. It is proposed as a plausible explanation that the sponsors appeal had this indirect effect, as a consequence of its motivational properties, and because it provided a concomitant reduction in stimulus ambiguity for the sponsored S, just as his own response, in turn, served the same function for the other Ss who witnessed his behavior. The strategy hypothesis was supported: good strategy produced significantly higher assessments of the actor's productivity than poor strategy. This effect occurred despite the fat that the two sets of actors were not differentiated in either their tsk ability or in perceived amount of talk. The good strategists were correctly viewed as the more apt to modify initial judgments, but that characteristic was generally unrelated to favorable over-all assessent. (Author0

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1961
Accession Number
AD0267818

Entities

People

  • Pauline N. Pepinsky
  • Richard J. Campbell

Organizations

  • Ohio State University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Ambiguity
  • Behavior And Behavior Mechanisms
  • Cognition
  • Engineering
  • Human Behavior
  • Hypotheses
  • Judgment
  • Mental Processes
  • Personality
  • Production Engineering
  • Productivity

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Technical Research and Report Writing.