Wednesday, 12 February 2014, 9:00a, CSCW 2014
Many managers and mentors for project teams desire more efficient and more effective ways of monitoring and predicting the quality of social relationships and the performance of teams under their purview. A previous study (Gonzales et al. 2009) found that one form of linguistic mimicry, linguistic style matching, and some lexical features indicated team performance and mutual attraction in short-term, laboratory tasks. In this paper, we evaluate whether these measures also work as indicators for performance, shared understanding, and team trust in longer-duration project teams, using only limited, unobtrusively ob- tained communication traces. In our four-month evaluation using student project team emails, we found no support for LSM or most of the previously identified measures as practical indicators in our field setting. We did find some support for using future-oriented words to indicate team performance over time.
I'm very interested in other perspectives on this study and alternative potential to try. We are unable to share the data (human subjects restrictions), but am happy to run other indicators against the data.