Bryan Bonner, PhD

Bonner is a professor at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business whose research centers on organizational behavior.

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research?

My training is in social psychology. I received my degree in 2000 from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. There, I started working on research involving group decision making and performance under my advisor, Patrick Laughlin, and with the guidance of other great group researchers like Joe McGrath and James Davis. In 2002, I moved to studying organizational behavior at the University of Utah, and that is where I have been working ever since. Although the topics I research have not changed, the foci of those topics have taken on a new applied element with the criterion of organizational relevance.

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

Past editors of Group Dynamics have been improving the journal’s quality for some time now. Part of my role, I think, is to lock down the existing positive trends and see what other opportunities can be leveraged to improve the journal in different ways. Group Dynamics is a broad journal in terms of its mandate and has the potential to make a larger impact across many different paradigms, including (but not limited to) experimental lab work, applied group therapy, and field studies in sport psychology. It seems, though, that it could be positioned to attract an even broader array of research submissions and to subsequently have greater appeal to readers across these areas. Working toward this involves both promoting greater visibility for the journal within each of its subdomains and making connections to related research from other fields that intersect with the journal’s mandate with respect to specific research projects—for example, research on leadership or cognitive biases examined in a team context. The multidisciplinary focus of this journal can be its strength, and the editorial team and I can work toward positioning the journal to become a forum for a wide span of scientific work that involves, in one aspect or another, the dynamic interactions of all varieties of group members. Group Dynamics serves as a big tent, and its diversity can be harnessed to drive its improvement.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now? 

Humans’ wants, needs, attitudes, productivity, and fundamental well-being are deeply affected by the dynamic group contexts surrounding their lives. Furthermore, the decisions people make as teams, as organizations, as peers, and as educators tend to reflect the prioritization of group consensus over individual power. Groups are both the context and the cause of much of who people are. The effects of dynamic group behavior are increasingly distributed globally by numerous forces, such as the mass availability of information (and the accompanying accountability brought about by citizen journalists), cheap technological tools that level the playing field to allow new competition into many domains, and continuously improving communication media used to facilitate collaboration across great distances and conflicting schedules. The world is getting more interactive and, in many respects, more group oriented all the time, and the rate of that change is increasing exponentially.

What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field? 

The challenges facing group dynamics research share, to a greater or lesser degree, many similarities with those of any discipline focused on humans and technology. Specifically, technology is fundamentally changing many aspects of social interactions. For group dynamics research to have value, researchers’ methods need to become more flexible, more reliable, and more sensitive to capture the complexity of this evolving landscape. The most urgent of these changing technologies is artificial intelligence (AI). As technology advances toward communicating with something approaching a human voice, how it then fits into the study of group dynamics will generate research questions that cannot yet be imagined. AI will increasingly become central to human existence and collaboration as a cognitive resource, a processing engine, a springboard for creativity, and a source of social and emotional support. It already influences how people interact with one another, do their work, and see themselves. People are both masters of the technology and those vulnerable to the rapidly expanding set of tasks AI can master within the human domain. Group dynamics researchers must be prepared to pivot to focus their work on the emerging understanding of AI as it continues to develop.

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Have you introduced or are you planning to introduce any changes? 

One initiative I am continuing at the journal is the adoption of the evolving standards of research reflected in the open science paradigm. The editorial team and I embrace and support this trend, and we are taking steps to make it as easy as possible for authors to be transparent about the contributions of different coauthors, as well as the legitimacy of their methods and the conclusions that they draw from their data. Whereas the endgame of this approach involves complete access to all materials involved in an author’s research, we are proceeding cautiously and with an awareness that, given our broad mandate, we receive submissions from many different disciplines with many different norms and practices. Our goal is to move toward more transparency, knowing that care must be taken not to alienate scholars from disciplines that have not adopted open science practices in precisely the same way as psychology has. Building a shared understanding of what transparency looks like across different fields, methodologies, and epistemological perspectives will be a gradual process.