Cooperative leadership in hyperscanning. Brain and body synchronization for professional interactions

Recent advances in neurosciences permitted to extend the knowledge about brain functioning to the organizational field with a specific interest to leadership, with the extent to explore more proficient ways of managing. In the present research, through a hyperscanning paradigm, EEG and autonomic (biofeedback) synchrony was explored during performance reviews to investigate if different leadership styles (partecipative vs. authoritative), could be associated with different dyadic engagement. In particular, we were interested in detecting different responses inside the leader-employee dyad characterized by different style of leadership during a sensitive managerial process. 11 leaders and 11 employees have been recruited and then randomly coupled in leader-employee dyads. Coherence analyses involved coherence computation assessing the strenght of inter-brain and body synchrony. Indeed EEG results revealed an increased delta and theta band activity over F3 and F4 for the partecipative group. Results also revealed the presence of a higher emotional synchronization for both neural and bodily reactions mainly for partecipative style.