Use of "We" and "Success" May Spell Trouble

The use of "we" and "success" was higher in teams that performed worse in a study of how team members talk while doing a task, according to the researchers, who did not expect this result. "It is possible that mention of the group identity by its members may have been an indication that groups were trying to create cohesiveness in an otherwise noncohesive group." They add, "words such as success and work may indicate that a group is talking about the task because they are not performing well."

Communications professors Amy Gonzales and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell University, and James Pennebaker of the Univ. of Texas, were interested in how teams use "function words" such as the, often, those, or some that have to be used no matter the topic. They found that members of teams performing well while talking face-to-face used similar percentages of function words in their conversations. There was not a strong link in teams only allowed to use computer chat tools to communicate. The authors says their results support other studies into "mimicry," the tendency of people in groups to match each other in language or behavior. They point out that this study does not show whether mimicry led to success or success led to more mimicry. But it is another way managers might use to check how a team is doing.

The greater use of "future" words like could or will correlated to higher performance in either medium. In teams that communicated more, as measured by number of words exchanged, and used similar amounts of function words, members reported greater togetherness or "cohesion" afterward. This was true regardless of the medium.

For the study, same-sex teams of four to six college students each competed to see which team could answer the most questions correctly by looking them up in almanacs. One question was, "What U.S. state was deemed the healthiest in 2006?" In some cases, multiple books had to be used. Thirty-four teams worked via chat only, and the others face-to-face. The article does not report whether teams did better with one medium or the other.

Source: Gonzales, A., J. Hancock, and J. Pennebaker (10), "Language Style Matching as a Predictor of Social Dynamics in Small Groups," Communications Research 37(1):3.