Despite increasing attention paid to team dynamics, we have a fairly limited understanding of the things that nascent teams can do to build cohesion and psychological safety. We propose that expressive social play, defined as group-based activities disconnected from work tasks, conducted for fun, and marked by norms of informality and expressivity, can address this, by generating a distinctive shared affective state, which we call collective exuberance. Across four studies, we develop and test this account. In Studies 1A and 1B, we compare expressive social play with other forms of adult group interaction – work, conversations, and rituals – and find that it generates uniquely high levels of collective exuberance, which is distinct from existing and potentially related constructs such as individual positive affect, group flow, and collective effervescence. In Study 2, we conducted a field experiment with student project teams. Teams that were randomly assigned to play during their first meeting together reported greater psychological safety four weeks later. In Study 3, we randomly assigned strangers into virtual teams and had them engage in social play, a gold-standard relationship-building paradigm grounded in self-disclosure, or a control condition that involved a getting-to-know-you style icebreaker. Those in the play condition reported higher levels of collective exuberance, and this mediated a significant effect on team cohesion as compared to the control. Together, these findings identify expressive social play as a novel form of team interaction and reveal its potential as an intervention for teams’ relational dynamics.
Keywords: play, collective exuberance, teams, relationships, psychological safety, cohesion, interventions