Abstract
Recording of team meeting’s processes with electronic devices can be problematic because of the invasiveness of the process: issues with privacy; interpretation difficulty with noise or quiet speech; and distortion of participants’ behaviour. There is a need for less intrusive methods. We developed the interaction diagram method by extending the directed graph nature of sociograms to capture the time sequence of events, including the identification of the person, communication behaviour, and duration of interactions. The method was tested on engineering team meetings. Data processing by quantitative and qualitative analysis is shown to be feasible. Several team roles were observed in the engineering context: Initiator; Passive collector; Explorer; Information provider; Facilitator; Arbitrator; Representative; Gatekeeper; Connector; and Outsider. The work provides a graphical representation of the record of the interaction flow during meetings. It does this without needing video recording. It is also an efficient method, as it does not require subsequent transcription or coding. It provides a procedure to quickly analyse communication situations, identify group roles, and compare group activity at different meetings.
Highlights
It is hard to imagine work in organisations today without regular team meetings
The interaction diagram provides a graphical method of representation of communication between team members
Interactions diagrams were built on the basis of the sociogram, with the addition of sequence or order of communication interactions
Summary
It is hard to imagine work in organisations today without regular team meetings. Team communication is an integral part of everyday routine activities because of the growing complexity of the decisions undertaken. Teams comprise multiple members with different characteristics and temperaments, and teams develop a communication style and habits of interaction. To observe these behaviours, it is necessary to record features of the communication. Recording of team processes can be difficult. While video and audio recording can provide a rich record of the interactions for subsequent analysis, there are multiple detriments: issues with privacy; difficulty of interpretation because of noise or quiet speech [1]; and distortion of the behaviour of team members [2]. More substantial ethics approval processes are required, and this prolongs the preparation stage of a research experiment
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