Shared Leadership as a Function of Role Assignment and Task Difficulty in a Distributed Computer Game

The use of computer game based architectures may help provide a safe, controlled environment in which geographically dispersed military units can develop leadership skills while rehearsing a specific task such as search and rescue. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among task difficulty, team task performance, role assignment and emergent leadership within a shared leadership model using a modified version of the popular video game, Half Life 2 ™. The researcher assessed leadership emergence through verbal content analysis methods that have only been employed in email and message boards media formats. Across levels of task difficulty and role assignment, individuals generated new ideas about how to find the medic, asked questions related to the task and gave information to the other team member. For all task conditions, the individual immersed in the virtual environment issued such utterances more often than the map holder and the immersed individual was rated as the overall leader by team members. Individuals rated each other as sharing leadership roughly 50% of the time, regardless of the level of task difficulty. Results of this study indicate the need for a coding scheme that taps into appropriate leadership behaviors within distributed teams using video game technology.