Convergence of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes across group meetings

ABSTRACT

Recent research has addressed the extent to which group communication exhibits intrapersonal and interpersonal characteristics. The most defensible and reasonable view appears to be that group interaction exhibits characteristics that fall somewhere in between, with group interaction revealing evidence of both individual- and group-level processes. Latent group and multilevel approaches were utilized to examine the use of functional communication in product design teams, across a series of tasks. The findings provided additional evidence for this middle road, or convergence approach, in that group members’ roles, as well as the function of discussion contributions, significantly varied across time, and at both levels of analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Group interaction
• decision-making
• roles
• participation
• meetings

Notes on contributors

Jennifer N. Ervin is a doctoral student.

Joseph A. Bonito is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona.

Joann Keyton is a professor of communication at North Carolina State University

Notes

1. The data are segmented at a variety of levels of analysis and the user chooses which to download and evaluate.

2. The coding scheme included negative social acts but these were so infrequent (87% of participants did not use them) that we excluded them from the analysis.

3. Researchers are often interested in fitting simpler covariance structures to data, though we did not do that here. The point of the LGM is not to test simpler models but to estimate covariances at both levels of analysis.

4. In order to save space, random variance and covariance estimates are not provided in the tables but are available from the authors.