In the sports world, researchers have been finding that there is more leadership in a team than just what comes from the team captain, and that team captains might not be the strongest suppliers of leadership in a team. Knowing this could cause us to reconsider how we view the “team captains” of chamber music. In this blog, I’d like to talk about some interesting findings from my master’s thesis about string quartets and their team captain equivalents: the first violinists. In 1991, J. Keith Murnighan and Donald E. Conlon conducted an interview study of British String Quartets. Members from forty major string quartets in the region were interviewed on their social dynamics of their groups. After qualifying the responses, Murnighan and Conlon noticed three paradoxes existing in the social dynamics of string quartets.
I’d like to unpack the first paradox Murnighan and Conlon observed in British String Quartets, which was that of the simultaneous existence of democracy and autocracy in quartets. Many interviewees expressed that the first violinist was the primary leader of the group (sometimes domineeringly so), but also stressed that quartets were democratic in their decision-making. Groups that had strong leaders for first violinists were rated as more successful by the study’s parameters. So how does this work? Are the other quartet members non-leaders, or subordinates to the first violinist? Is autocracy the best model for quartet leadership? In my master’s thesis, we (my supervisor and I) surveyed chamber ensembles to see who members viewed as the strongest representative of four leadership types (Task, Social, Motivational, and External). After we answered our initial research questions, we decided to go on a tangent to explore this first violinist paradox. To go on our tangent, we omitted other groups in our study and just looked at who was viewed as what kind of leader in our string quartets. Again, the data for our tangent was quite small and our findings weren’t meant to be definitive, but we did notice some lamp posts for future research. Firstly, the principle violinist (Player 1) was overwhelmingly viewed as Task Leader who focuses on training and instruction. However, Player 2 (sitting next to the first violinist) was more often viewed as the Motivational (encouragement in rehearsal) and Social Leader (keeping harmony), and Player 4 was by far viewed as the External Leader (representing the group to others) by their colleagues. Additionally, the first violinists of the groups did not hold the most leadership roles overall. Player 4 was most often viewed as being a leader in any role. Player 1 came in second, but no one was significantly more of an overall leader than anyone else, showing an even spread of leadership through the group. So, it seems that leadership is strong within all members of quartets, but that players may have role specialties based on where they’re sitting. First violinists may tend to be Task Leaders, inside players may be more encouraging and engaging, and outside players may be the ones who typically represent the group to the outside world. These possible relationships need to be studied in more depth before we can make any definite conclusions, though. To me, this jives well with Murnighan and Conlon’s findings. Yes, there is strong task leadership in the first violinist chair, but there is equally strong leadership coming from the other three chairs (or benches) in different forms. The important thing to remember is that each type of leadership is valuable, and that balancing these roles is paramount. Thanks for reading! Feel free to share the link to this blog with friends and colleagues! See you next time. -Mark Kleyn
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