Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are commonly seen as a way of reaching better decisions compared to solutions that do not require coordination between the individuals (e.g. voting)---through discussion, the sum becomes greater than the parts. However, this assumption is not irrefutable: anecdotal evidence of wasteful discussions abounds, and in our own experiments we find that over 30 of discussions are unproductive. We propose a framework for analyzing conversational dynamics in order to determine whether a given task-oriented discussion is worth having or not. We exploit conversational patterns reflecting the flow of ideas and the balance between the participants, as well as their linguistic choices. We apply this framework to conversations naturally occurring in an online collaborative world exploration game developed and deployed to support this research. Using this setting, we show that linguistic cues and conversational patterns extracted from the first 20 seconds of a team discussion are predictive of whether it will be a wasteful or a productive one.
We analyze the linguistic behaviour of participants in bilateral electronic negotiations, and discover that particular language characteristics are in contrast with face-to-face negotiations. Language patterns in the later part of electronic negotiation are highly indicative of the successful or unsuccessful outcome of the process, whereas in face-toface negotiations, the first part of the negotiation is more useful for predicting the outcome. We formulate our problem in terms of text classification on negotiation segments of different sizes. The data are represented by a variety of linguistic features that capture the gist of the discussion: negotiationor strategy-related words. We show that, as we consider ever smaller final segments of a negotiation transcript, the negotiationrelated words become more indicative of the negotiation outcome, and give predictions with higher Accuracy than larger segments from the beginning of the process. Abstract Over the past several decades, social network research has favored either ego-centric (e.g. employee) or bounded networks (e.g. organization) as the primary unit of analysis. This paper revitalizes a focus on the work group, which includes structural properties of both its individual members and the collection as a whole. In a study of 182 work groups in a global organization, we found that structural holes of leaders within groups as well as core-periphery and hierarchical group structures were negatively associated with performance. We show that these effects hold even after controlling for mean levels of group communication, and discuss implications for the future of network analysis in work groups and informal organizations. Bavelas, Smith and Leavitt Bavelas, A. 1950. Communication patterns in task-oriented groups. J. Acoustical Soc. Amer.22 725--730. have posed the problem: what effect do communication patterns have upon the operation of groups? To study this problem they designed a laboratory situation that is a prototype of those occurring in “natural” organizations existing in government and business. Each member of the group is given certain information. Their task is to assemble this information, use it to make a decision, and then issue orders based on the decision. This design provides a situation stripped of the complexities of large-scale social groups but retaining some essential characteristics of the organizational communication problem. In it we can examine how the communication net affects simultaneously a the development of the organization's internal structure, and b the group's performance of its operating task.