Travail de recherche/Working paper
| Résumé : | Are some types of interactions beneficial or harmful to team performance? Should conflict among members be promoted or avoided in teams to achieve better results? Many questions arise when trying to understand how group dynamics impact its performance. The present study intends to highlight the kinds of verbal interactions which influence the performance of a team during a meeting. A two-phase (design and building) videotaped decision-making experiment was organised with 41 teams. All interactions were then coded with the INSIDE TEAMS3D (IT3D) coding system. Three dimensions of interactions were considered: their functional meaning, the convergence among interactions (including content or process conflict) and their interpersonal emotional meaning (including indications of relational conflict). Performance was measured for each group as an assignment result. It was positively associated with the total number of interactions shared. The results support that some functional meaning categories are positively associated with performance: thus, groups which shared more interactions aiming at offering an opinion or a suggestion on the content, get on average better outcomes. Socialization categories (making jokes, fostering the conversation) were also positively correlated with performance. The study of interactions convergence within groups also provides significant results, showing that disagreements on the content have positive relations with team performance. Negative interpersonal emotional meaning is also showing positive relations with performance, which are discussed in the paper. On top of these considerations on interaction types, the research reveals that the groups with balanced contributions between members during the exercise got higher performance than those facing great heterogeneity. More generally, this paper provides methodological insights about a way to study group dynamics and gather data on interactions and performance. |
