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My Team Will Go On: Differentiating High and Low Viability Teams through Team Interaction

Published: 05 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding team viability --- a team's capacity for sustained and future success --- is essential for building effective teams. In this study, we aggregate features drawn from the organizational behavior literature to train a viability classification model over a dataset of 669 10-minute text conversations of online teams. We train classifiers to identify teams at the top decile (most viable teams), 50th percentile (above a median split), and bottom decile (least viable teams), then characterize the attributes of teams at each of these viability levels. We find that a lasso regression model achieves an accuracy of .74--.92 AUC ROC under different thresholds of classifying viability scores. From these models, we identify the use of exclusive language such as 'but' and 'except', and the use of second person pronouns, as the most predictive features for detecting the most viable teams, suggesting that active engagement with others' ideas is a crucial signal of a viable team. Only a small fraction of the 10-minute discussion, as little as 70 seconds, is required for predicting the viability of team interaction. This work suggests opportunities for teams to assess, track, and visualize their own viability in real time as they collaborate.

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 4, Issue CSCW3
    CSCW
    December 2020
    1825 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3446568
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Published: 05 January 2021
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW3

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    Author Tags

    1. collaboration
    2. predictability
    3. remote work
    4. team dynamics
    5. team viability

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    • National Science Foundation award
    • RISE Thailand Consortium
    • the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program
    • the Office of Naval Research
    • Stanford Data Science Initiative

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