International Journal of Organizational Leadership

Abstract

In group-level collaboration at work, there is a mutual dynamic in which members are influenced by the attitudes of others while also influencing the attitudes of others. However, it is difficult to depict the phenomenon of group change itself via questionnaires and interviews. Therefore, in this study, we conducted a protocol analysis for voice data from a meeting to examine the attitude change within a group in detail. Protocol data were acquired from educational program development through industry-academia collaboration in Japan, and we analyzed conversation data with the following two aims. The first aim was to quantitatively confirm the basic tendency of the speaker type and the descriptive pattern in the work scene classified with a classified descriptive form code. The second aim was to describe the attitude changes of group members via interpretive analysis of group-level utterance cases using descriptive codes. The analysis indicates that an implicit cooperative relationship may have occurred in terms of the speakers’ role and the pattern of speech. Specifically, the results suggest that two members dared to express conflicting attitudes and changed the overall opinion while respecting the opinions of members of other organizations. These are among the results of the quantitative analysis of the utterance structure using descriptive form codes as the basic data for conversation analysis. In practice, these findings could be applied to deliberately control the attitudes of members within an organization.