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 Many retail establishments carefully select the music they play in
order to influence consumer behavior, such as encouraging shoppers
to buy more, the authors write. But employees hear the same music
and its effect on them hasn’t been studied.
“In our case, the new article focuses attention on the role of music
in relation to management questions,” said lead author Kevin M.
Kniffin of Cornell University in New York.
In the first of two studies, 78 participants were randomly divided
into two groups: a “happy music” group that heard songs like “Yellow
Submarine” by The Beatles and the theme from the television show
“Happy Days,” and an “unhappy music” group that heard less familiar
heavy metal songs like “Smokahontas” by Attack Attack!
The participants in each group used a computer application in which
they played a sort of economics game with other unidentified
participants in the same room, but players didn’t speak to one
another.
In the application, each person was given 10 tokens corresponding to
monetary value and was paired with two other people. Over 20 rounds
of decision-making, each person was prompted to either keep their
tokens or allocate them to a group pool which would be split among
the participants at the end. Tokens in the group pool were valued
1.5 times as much as those held individually.
Consistently, people listening to happy music contributed more to
the group pool.
In a second study, the researchers repeated the design with an added
no-music group, and also measured participants’ moods.
Again, those hearing happy music contributed more to the group pool
than those hearing unhappy music or no music at all. Unhappy music
elicited a worse mood than both other conditions, and a happier mood
was tied to more token contributions to the group, according to the
results in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
“The bottom line is that emotions count,” said Neal M. Ashkanasy,
professor of management at The University of Queensland in Brisbane,
Australia, who was not part of the new research.
People in a positive mood are more cooperative and more creative,
while those in a negative mood tend to narrow in on solving
individual problems rather than group problems, Ashkanasy told
Reuters Health.
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“Interestingly, we find that mood helps to explain some of the
relationship - such that people's moods get lifted by happy music -
but we also find a statistically independent effect for happy music
in relation to cooperation,” Kniffin told Reuters Health by email.
“Given that having a good rhythm is a definitional feature of happy
music, our article suggests that people are partly motivated to
cooperate when happy music is being played because of the rhythm's
tendency to get people into sync with each other,” he said.
Retail outlets already use things like music, lighting, paint color
and even smell to influence customer behavior, in some cases
encouraging lingering in the store and in other cases encouraging
“churn” through the doors, Kniffin said.
“Our article calls on people to recognize that the atmospherics --
including but not limited to music -- that are designed to influence
consumer behavior should be recognized for their potential
importance in relation to -- and potential conflict with -- employee
behavior,” he said.
“In terms of the potential for ‘bad music’ to adversely affect
employees in the workplace, it is interesting that in the context of
our lab experiments, at least, there was no harm done in relation to
cooperative decision making when Screamo music was played when
compared with no music,” Kniffin said.
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