Proceedings Article | 3 January 2020
KEYWORDS: Psychophysiology, Electroencephalography, Cognitive neuroscience, Interdisciplinary fields, Document management, Video, Blood pressure, Oximetry, Statistical analysis, Motion estimation
Organizational behavior and organizational cognitive neuroscience are newly established interdisciplinary fields that use scientific techniques to answer questions about behaviors within organizations. Clarifying the more precise role of emotions and their regulation in forming a judgment in different managerial decision-making contexts, exploring how team members function synchronously, and the links between psychophysiological traits and how they relate to leadership, have been recurring subjects of interest. In this document, we present the psychophysiological response of eight senior project managers and eight junior project managers as they are faced with a challenging situation designed to assess some of the most relevant personal skills in project management: teamwork, management, problem, and conflicts resolution. Noninvasive electroencephalography (EEG), voice recording (VoR) and video recording (ViR) were performed during the application of an Assessment Center evaluation in addition to before and after heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) measurements. The results suggest that the voice frequency is related to the task that a subject performs. In this case, an activity that requires active discussion causes a person to talk at a higher pitch, which is the mean value of the fundamental frequency of the voice. In relation to the analysis of the voice depending on the project management expertise, no significant differences were found for calculated voice features. These results suggest that the voice features are not related with the project management expertise. On the other hand, the coefficient of variation of facial redness for junior project managers groups was higher than those of the senior manager groups. This indicates that even though facial readiness was not universally higher for the junior project manager, it is much more prevalent in those with the shorter project management expertise. With respect to the estimation of subject’s task engagement, measured through head movement cue analysis, it can be said that this method of engagement estimation proved to be in accordance with the expert psychology’s opinion. In concern with EEG, no statistically significant differences were found in frontal asymmetry value between the discussion stage and the presentation and ideation stage and between Senior and Junior managers in the discussion stage. Regarding the before and after heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) measurements, even though, in general all three variables had a discernible behavior (HR and BP increased while SpO2 decreased), no statistical relevant differences were found in the pre and pose measurements. However, it can be said that the Assessment Center evaluation induced a physiological response on the subjects since, at least one of three variables varied for each subject.
