2024

Jonathan Kush's research wins Article of the Year award

Assistant professor of management receives Keyton-Brower Best Paper Award for article appearing in Small Group Research

Research from Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing Jonathan Kush has received Small Group Research's Best Paper Award in 2023-24 for his collaborative research, "A Text-Based Measure of Transactive Memory System Strength."

"Transactive memory is often described as the sense from team members that they have a good understanding of who knows what in a team," explains Kush. "We know that transactive memory is important for understanding which teams succeed, but it isn't always easy to stop and ask them to do a survey.

"With this research, we've demonstrated that you can measure transactive memory in a team just by looking at their conversations. There are a lot of settings where we may be interested in studying transactive memory systems (TMS), like in military teams or in emergency medical services units, but the tools we had weren't that conducive."

"We know that transactive memory is important for understanding which teams succeed, but it isn't always easy to stop and ask them to do a survey. With this research, we've demonstrated that you can measure transactive memory in a team just by looking at their conversations."
Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing Jonathan Kush

The paper, published with co-authors Brandy Aven and Linda Argote, faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, developed a method to assess the three indicators of TMS—specialization, credibility, and coordination—through computer-aided text analysis.

The research's results show that having more of certain types of communication is indicative of the extent of the development of a TMS. This paper is novel in demonstrating that the specific words included in conversations within a group can be used to assess the group's TMS level, and this assessment can be semi-automated with computers, removing a barrier to an unobtrusive assessment of TMS.

"We hope that this research not only leads to more investigation of how TMS affects teams, but also for other researchers to leverage the method we developed to advance other unobtrusive measures of team collaboration," says Kush.

In recognition of this award, Sage Journals has granted this research paper open access for a year.