Listen and learn: Research paper Research papers are a pairing of two 18 minute presentations followed by 18 minutes of Discussion led by a Discussant, with remaining time for Q & A.
This is presentation 2 of 2, scroll down to see more details.
Other presentations in this group:
This research primarily follows distributed leadership (Spillane, 2006), which originally developed as a theory for educators to share horizontal leadership in schools; but which exemplifies more general plural leadership theory (Bennett & Hempsall; Denis et al.; Ospina et al.) through its focus on equity instead of hierarchy, and authentic, dynamic teamwork. The presenters' unique contributions to the above include a focus on students' unique, identity-influenced, salient perceptions of the group experience, reflecting constructionism and self-authorship theory.
Participants were selected as esports teams (DOTA2, League of Legends, and Overwatch) through snowball sampling for a deductive focus group / semi-structured interview in which they were asked to share situations and their corresponding social interactions as they were practiced in the games they play.
Specifically, the questions asked included how leaders were selected, how problems were addressed, how knowledge was shared, how connected they were as a team, and how the team functioned in various environments, both in the game and outside of the game.
These incidents were processed and coded using the five themes of Distributed Leadership: situation/context, agency, innovation ambidexterity, knowledge sharing, and connectedness in which two members of the research team checked for consensus and sought a third colleague in any case of disagreement on theme connection.
The results showed that in situation and context, role selection and strategic response were common themes in which players described accommodation and social common understandings enacted across team members. Examples of agency were found, and particularly interesting was the idea that some teams noted that leadership was not always the result of agency, but agency was necessary for leadership to occur. Innovation ambidexterity, a term taken from business in which both long-term trends and acute needs, connected well with the consistently changing and randomized situations that would arise in the game. Knowledge sharing yielded a number of examples in which players noted the social settings and conditions that would be in place before knowledge was shared. Coaching and in-game communication were both examples of knowledge sharing. Players needed to feel agency before they would freely share knowledge. Such belongingness and agency were dependent in part on the individual identities held by members of these teams, which establishes a strong connection to inclusivity as the entryway to collaboration.
Another result from this exploration was a distributed leadership fidelity instrument which measures all of these dimensions using a Likert-scale questionnaire, which has not yet been submitted to validity or reliability testing at the time of this proposal.
Identifying group dynamics relative to each specific member of a team, and having a measure using common language, are keys to diversifying teams.
Using a leadership theory that emphasizes equity over hierarchy is absolutely crucial to accessing each individual's potential: others on the team must learn to be responsive enough to each other team member and their salient experience. Distributed Leadership and its tenets refer to dynamic, shared behaviors of leadership, which must begin at the level of each individual student's engagement. If this engagement is blocked by bias and lack of belonging, the student cannot share in the enactment of leadership and full participation.
This study will aid ISTE attendees to consider ways to measure the importance and prevalence of diversity and inclusion practices in the development of soft skills and teamwork- while applying these practices in a dynamic but parameter-bounded esports game environment as a learning and practice space.
Denis, J. L., Langley, A., & Sergi, V. (2012). Leadership in the plural. The Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 211–283. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2012.667612
Ospina, S. M., Foldy, E. G., Fairhurst, G. T., & Jackson, B. (2020). Collective dimensions of leadership: Connecting theory and method. Human Relations, 73(4), 441–463. doi:10.1177/0018726719899714
Spillane, J. P. (2006). Distributed leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Return
Trips and Tours