In the Summer of 2012 (or thereabouts) I was speaking with Linda Argote about what my next independent project would be. I talked with conviction that I thought, over the Summer, I could come up with some way of analyzing the discussion within a team to determine the strength of their Transactive Memory Systems (TMS). She gave me the sign-off to start that project, running parallel to data collection to what would turn into our 2018 paper in Organization Science.
After a number of twists, turns, setbacks, and improvements, that project has now been published as a paper in Small Group Research with my co-authors: Linda Argote and Brandy Aven. We develop and demonstrate the efficacy of a fully text-based measure of TMS. In our case, we analyzed the text of group conversations over an instant messanger, but I don’t have any reason to believe that there wouldn’t be some value in applying this measure to other types of group transcripts. One important thing to me was to make this assessment easy to use so, if you take a look at the Supplementary Materials, you’ll find the LIWC formatted dictionary files. I’ve started work on an R package to make the measure even easier to use but, if you have LIWC, you can use our measure.
LIWC-15 Dictionary File (due to the use of n-grams in dictionary, results may vary between LIWC-15 vs. LIWC-22)