Correlating Performance With Social Network Structure Through Teaching Social Network Analysis

Teaching a course on optimizing online communication behavior and social network analysis permitted us to obtain preliminary results on correlating temporal online communication patterns with team performance. Students from Helsinki University of Technology and University of Cologne who had never met face to face formed virtual interdisciplinary teams collaborating on a common task. While collaborating over long distance, students kept track of their own communication activities by e-mail, chat, and conference calls with Skype. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce an innovative course format creating an empirical base for team performance in a distributed online communication environment. Secondly, we provide basic analysis of correlations between SNA measures and team performance. Students used these insights to optimize their own communication behavior for future virtual collaboration.