Monitoring email to indicate project team performance and mutual attraction

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 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 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.

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