Temporal patterns of cohesiveness in virtual groups
Abstract
Group cohesiveness is a vital social dynamic that is difficult to achieve in virtual teams, but leadership can help groups move past these challenges. We used the Language Style Matching metric to measure group cohesiveness over the course of interaction while groups with either assigned or emerging leaders worked via online chat to complete a collaborative task. We find that overall, successful groups are more cohesive than unsuccessful groups at all times. For groups with assigned leaders, we find this same pattern of cohesiveness. For groups with emerging leaders we find that successful groups and unsuccessful groups are similar in group cohesiveness during the first two-thirds of interaction, but during the final third successful groups are more cohesive than unsuccessful groups.