1. Does anyone here have pointers to peer-reviewed research showing any long-term benefits (productivity, staff retention, morale) of corporate team-building exercises?
2. Is there a better place to post requests like this? Cries for help on Twitter only produced useful results occasionally, Quora and Stack Overflow haven't been productive either, and Google has become bloody useless…
Thanks in advance.
@gvwilson I'm not sure that it's directly in the wheelhouse of either @mhoye or @grimalkina, but it sounds at least somewhat related to things they care about. Perhaps one of them may chime in if they happen to know of resources.
@grimalkina @internic @gvwilson I've never seen, or even heard of, any empirical followup on the utility of team-building exercises. A lot of these ideas were born in the 1920s - see "The Hawthorne Effect" - but the data behind the Hawthorne was rediscovered in 2011 and the whole thing turned out to be more of an anecdote than an experiment. The guy who finally recovered the data argued there _might_ be some measurable impact, but he's an economist, so what can you do.
@mhoye @internic @gvwilson one area for evaluation that does occur to me is onboarding programs, which can be evaluated at scale at some large places. But a lot of that doesn't ever make it to publication. Very very hard to get companies to agree to let you do a project & publishing on team activities of any kind :). But there are internal metrics and eval teams for places that run large scale education courses for employees like Google
@internic @gvwilson @mhoye I'd look at something like the journal of management science but I guarantee there is less about discrete trainings and more about team building over time. Where there is depth that I've seen on corporate trainings it is much more likely to be research on diversity trainings. This kind of implementation question is typically just not asked by a company as an evaluation target.