Assessing group-level participation in fluid teams: testing a new metric

Participation is an important factor in team success. We propose a new metric of participation equality that provides an unbiased estimate across groups of different sizes and across those that change size over time. Using 11 h of transcribed utterances from informal, fluid, colocated workgroup meetings, we compared the associations of this metric with coded equality of participation and standard deviation. While coded participation and our metric had similar patterns of findings, standard deviation had a somewhat different pattern, suggesting that it might lead to incorrect assessments with fluid teams. Exploratory analyses suggest that, as compared with mixed-age/status groups, groups of younger faculty had more equal participation and that the presence of negative affect words was associated with more dominated participation. Future research can take advantage of this new metric to further theory on team processes in both face-to-face and distributed settings.