Building Better Ideas Together: Understanding the Influence of Individual and Contextual Characteristics on the Emergence of Transactivity

Teams are formed to achieve goals that cannot be accomplished by individuals alone. To achieve these goals, teams need to process information through communication, integrate diverse knowledge, and reason effectively together. Transactivity, or the process in which conversation partners build on each other’s reasoning, is a potentially important determinant of group effectiveness that has received very little attention from group scholars. In this dissertation, I ask “How can we help conversation partners understand each other and build new knowledge?” and explore how individual differences in personality traits and features of the problem context influence the emergence of transactivity. 

In Chapter 1, I review the theoretical background on transactivity, which originates in developmental psychology, and discuss parallels with related work in organizational behavior. I compare transactivity to similar constructs and discuss the similarities in how it captures the quality of interaction and communication that influence individual and group cognition and learning. I also describe the process of constructing and validating a measure of transactivity in dyadic communication, first by developing sub-dimensions of transactivity for human coding based on both written and spoken dialogue, which are used as a basis for developing natural language processing (NLP) algorithms for automatic detection of transactivity I use in the analyses presented in subsequent chapters. 

In Chapter 2, I investigate the influence of personality traits in the emergence of transactivity. Drawing upon Piagetian theory of learning and research on communication, I theorize how different combinations of partners’ personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, honesty-humility, openness to experience) can facilitate transactive exchanges in dyads. I test my predictions in an archival dataset of online discussion board exchanges, employing the algorithm developed in preliminary work. 

In Chapter 3, I integrate transactive goal dynamics theory, research on negotiation, and collaborative learning to theorize about contextual factors that shape the emergence of transactivity in dyadic negotiation. Specifically, I develop hypotheses about how goal interdependence complexity or task demonstrability and power relations jointly affect transactivity emergence between two negotiators. I test my predictions in an experiment where I manipulate goal interdependence complexity and power balance in dyads engaging in a negotiation exercise, and analyze their effects on transactivity as measured by our algorithm. 

In Chapter 4, I synthesize the preceding chapters and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of research on transactivity in organizations. Additionally, I address the limitations of each chapter and offer suggestions for future research. This chapter highlights how my dissertation advances our understanding of learning and knowledge-building activities in organizations through the lens of transactivity.