We know that a sedentary lifestyle and sitting all day at work leads to major health risks, even to an extent that Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has said that "excessive sitting is a lethal activity" (Vlahos, 2011). What you didn't know was that sitting in meetings is not only hazardous to your health, but is negatively impacting your cognitive and group performance, too.
Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, studied 54 groups to simulate a typical meeting environment where meeting attendees work together on a group-based creativity task. While their control group worked in a typical meeting room with a conference table and chairs (sedentary workspace), the test group environment had the chairs removed from the room. Knight and Baer found that "physical space shapes performance indirectly by affecting group members' arousal and territorial behavior, which together influence information elaboration" (Knight & Baer, 2014). In other words, the chairs in the room affected group members physiologically (increased activity, moving around more) and behaviorally (using a physical object like a chair to create boundaries or "territories" of ownership to protect their individual ideas), ultimately altering group dynamics by changing the way they exchanged information and perspectives with each other.
Removing chairs from the conference room isn't going to automatically make you and your teams more creative, but could create an environment where teams collaborate and share perspectives in a way that leads them to better and more innovative solutions.
Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, studied 54 groups to simulate a typical meeting environment where meeting attendees work together on a group-based creativity task. While their control group worked in a typical meeting room with a conference table and chairs (sedentary workspace), the test group environment had the chairs removed from the room. Knight and Baer found that "physical space shapes performance indirectly by affecting group members' arousal and territorial behavior, which together influence information elaboration" (Knight & Baer, 2014). In other words, the chairs in the room affected group members physiologically (increased activity, moving around more) and behaviorally (using a physical object like a chair to create boundaries or "territories" of ownership to protect their individual ideas), ultimately altering group dynamics by changing the way they exchanged information and perspectives with each other.
Removing chairs from the conference room isn't going to automatically make you and your teams more creative, but could create an environment where teams collaborate and share perspectives in a way that leads them to better and more innovative solutions.
Check out these links to learn more about non-sedentary work habits:
"Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" by James Vlahos
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html
"Get Up, Stand Up: The Effects of a Non-sedentary Workspace on Information Elaboration and Group Performance" by Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer
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