Improving meetings by identifying informal roles played by participants

The efficiency of a meeting has a lot to do with the attitudes the participants have towards the meeting goals. The outcome of a meeting is very dependent on how the meeting participants behave, i.e., how they assume expected roles. We can select participants based on their ability to play the desired roles prior to the meeting, or we can later try to examine the participants' behavior by analyzing their interventions during the meeting. This paper discusses this latter approach and suggests a semantic network analysis to map interventions onto roles, defined as essential to a good team performance.