Raising Stars: Influences of Robotic Peer Liking on Emergent Leadership

Emergent leadership in teams is known as a special type of informal leadership that has unique benefits. Given that this form of leadership can be developed only organically from within the team, an informal leader may not emerge and the associated advantages can be missed. We explored the possibility of leveraging robotic social behavior to facilitate the emergence of leadership in a team. We evaluated whether a robot displaying explicit peer liking towards a specific team member would encourage that team member to take the lead. Two (stranger) participants were asked to engage in a search task together with a robotic dog who either presented peer-liking behavior toward one or both of them during the opening encounter. Our findings suggest that the robot's peer liking led the “Liked” participant to report higher sense of leadership and higher sense of responsibility over the task. Behavioral measures also indicated that the “Liked” participant managed the team's performance. We suggest that integrating a robot into human teams presents an opportunity to facilitate unique dynamics that would not develop when imposing a structure on the team from the outside.