Monitoring email to indicate project team performance and mutual attraction

Abstract

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 [13] 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 longerduration project teams, using only limited, unobtrusively obtained 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.

Classification of Group Potency Levels of Software Development Student Teams

“…In order to test this relationship, a Cohesion measure was calculated by the LSM equation as proposed in [8]. It is important to mention that researchers who have used this measure have not found a relationship between LSM-based cohesion and performance in tasks that required virtual teams to communicate using emails [5]. Nevertheless, cohesion based on LSM has been used to show a positive relationship between cohesion and performance in chat communication settings [21], [22].…”

“…On the other hand, high group potency teams used a higher percentage of verbs related to the future category than low group potency teams. It has been reported that future-oriented words can be be linked to performance indicators [5]. Thus, it is possible that high potency teams tend to use more future verbs because they are more focused on the project's tasks.…”

“…Nevertheless, this same electronic media now allows managers to keep track of the actions and interactions that occur within a work team. Moreover, the data obtained from these electronic media can be converted into useful information for not only the managers of global teams [4], [5] but also researchers who are looking at various elements Alberto Castro-Hernández and Kathleen Swigger are with Computer Science Department, University of North Texas, USA (e-mail: albertocastrohernandez@my.unt.edu, kathy@cse.unt.edu).…”

Effects of Cohesion-Based Feedback on the Collaborations in Global Software Development Teams

“…This particular study tested the LSM measure using chat communications generated during a one-hour session from single gender teams. However, researchers who have applied LSM to the analysis of email messages among team members over an extended period of time were unable to duplicate the significant relationship between cohesion and performance [23].…”

Web Designer / Client Communication: An in-situ development and evaluation of tools and methods to support the collaborative design of interactive technologies

“…The monitoring of communication channels in a way in which information is visible to others may impact how such technologies may be adopted (Munson, Kervin, & Robert Jr, 2014), and awareness must be considered in the context of its use (Abowd, Dey, Brown, Davies, Smith, & Steggles, 1999). Providing feedback from automated sharing is important, and should also provide the ability for users to control the sharing in the meantime, to reduce anxiety related to over-sharing information (Patil, Schlegel, Kapadia, & Lee, 2014).…”