Discovery of small group interactions and performance from project emails

Abstract

Despite latest advances in small group research, discovery of group interactions and performance from analysis of small group communication, such as project emails, is still minimally represented. This paper presents a novel approach of studying small groups through analysis of the participants' emails sent to the project manager. We examined 1,105 email messages from managers' email in-boxes across five distinct ICT projects from the personal, social, collaborative, and engaging perspective of the email senders and link the findings to group performance. The study provides theoretical evidence that analysis of incoming communication from project managers' email in-box can be used to measure a group's success. For project managers the approach has the potential to be highly beneficial for monitoring of indicators for the state of project health. © Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Information Systems (IS) for the Future, PACIS 2020. All rights reserved