Interpersonal Trust Activity to Increase Team Creativity Outcome: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Approach

Organizational research demonstrates that team interpersonal trust enhances team performance and creativity. Design thinking offers many interactive team events such as warm-up games that are aimed at increasing team trust and collaboration. While effective in practice, little is understood about the underlying brain mechanisms that facilitate interpersonal trust during these activities. In this chapter, we present a novel interpersonal trust activity centered around human emotions that is designed to enhance interpersonal trust in both in-person and virtual (zoom) team interactions. We hypothesize that participating in an interpersonal trust activity prior to a collaborative design task will increase interpersonal trust and the creativity level of the collaborative outcome (i.e., creative product/innovation). We present our scientific approach for testing this hypothesis by applying the methods of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning in both in-person and virtual (video conferencing) team interactions. A better understanding of the neural signatures underlying an interpersonal trust activity will allow design thinking practitioners and educators to design novel and effective design thinking activities and interactions that can positively impact team trust and collaboration.