A new study has found that standing during meetings boosts the excitement around creative group processes and reduces people's tendency to defend their turf.
"Organizations should design office spaces that facilitate non-sedentary work," Andrew Knight of the Olin Business School at Washington University said.
Removing chairs could be a low-cost way to redesign an office space while also tackling the health effects of sitting in one place for too long, he said, citing mounting evidence that a sedentary lifestyle is poor for people's health.
"Our study shows that even a small tweak to a physical space can alter how people work with one another," he said.
Knight became interested in exploring the group dynamics of standing meetings when his university was constructing a new building. He remembers brainstorming with colleague Markus Bauer about possible furniture configurations.
"We were particularly interested in the role of a sedentary workspace because standing desks were a new option that was available to faculty members for outfitting their offices," Knight said.
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"We wondered how this type of arrangement would play out for people working together in a group to achieve a collective goal," he said.
So Knight and Bauer designed a study that asked participants to work together in teams for 30 minutes to develop and record a university recruitment video. The teams worked in rooms that either had chairs arranged around a table or with no chairs at all. fter making the videos, research assistants rated how the team worked together and the quality of the videos, while the participants rated how territorial their team members were in the group process.
The participants wore small sensors around their wrists to measure "physiological arousal" - the way people's bodies react when they get excited.
When a person's arousal system becomes activated, sweat glands around the feet and hands release bursts of moisture. The sensors pass a small current of electricity through the skin to measure these moisture bursts.
Knight and Bauer found that the teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and less idea territoriality than those in the seated arrangement.
Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas; this reduced territoriality led to more information sharing and higher quality videos.
The study is published in Social Psychological and Personalty Science.