Hoe meer omstanders bij een ramp, hoe minder hulp er wordt geboden
Margreet Vermeulen13 april 2016, 2:00
Met zijn allen toekijken hoe iemand verdrinkt? Dat kun je niemand kwalijk nemen, want wel of níet ingrijpen is geen bewuste keuze, maar een reflex. Dat blijkt uit promotie-onderzoek van neurowetenschapper Ruud Hortensius van de Universiteit Tilburg naar het ‘omstandereffect’.
In this dutch article, a researcher discusses findings on the bystander effect – freezing up when help is needed in public situations. What they found out, is that the phenomenon is stronger when more people are present, and that the inherent reflex to help or do nothing is something you can train by focusing on empathy (people with higher empathy have a higher bias towards helping).
If you relate this to team work, you could conclude two things:
1. Keep your teams small. Having less people involved results in quicker action when someone needs help. For instance with a maximum team size of 3-9 people as used in Scrum.
2. Make sure empathy is high within your team and keep up active improvements to maintain a high level of empathy in the team members. For instance by making sure there is time to relate to eachothers life situations, sharing joy and pain and working actively to improve sharing values and beliefs.
What do you think?
Recent Comments