Role-Related Participation in Product Design Teams

Abstract

Organizations often delegate decision-making tasks to groups and teams. At issue is the extent to which participation during discussion reflects both individual-level characteristics and emergent (i.e., group-level) processes. Drawing upon Hewes's socio-egocentric model and team meeting literature, we used a multilevel approach to examine participation in product-design teams across a series of tasks. Findings indicate that participation consists of both intra-and group-level processes. Team members who were talkative initially continued to participate frequently during the later tasks, and, as predicted, project managers also spoke more often than team members in any other role. In addition, group-level trends became stronger over time, as evidenced by behavioral convergence. Discussion addresses implications for a "middle ground" approach to modeling communicative behavior in groups.

Estimation and application of the latent group model.

“…The purpose of the meetings was for the groups to develop recommendations regarding ballot measures in Oregon. Part of the problem includes recognizing when to impose structure on the meetings in order for the group to “truly deliberate.” Bonito, Keyton, and Ervin (2015), examined participant trends over four meetings, with each meeting having a different focus or purpose. Participation at T1, as evidenced by the rather low intraclass correlation, consisted largely of individual-level (i.e., intrapersonal) processes but by T4 groups accounted for approximately 50% of the variance in participation.…”