ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that what teams don’t say in their interaction is likely to have commensurate importance with what they do say. A review of background studies indicates the importance that intervals of silence in interacting teams can have on idea generation and relates social structure of the team to the willingness of its members to coact in silence. A study is reported in which the effect of structure in groups is operationalized in the distribution of member status and then related to intervals of silence in the information exchange of an idea generation task. Results show that status-equal groups spend more time in silence than status-differentiated groups and also exchange significantly more ideas than status-differentiated groups. This relationship is further analyzed in models of silence as discrete time events. Results of first-order Markov models support inferences on the relationship of silence events to idea initiation. For all groups, results indicate that, the probability of an idea is greater than for any other information type following a period of silence. Results further indicate that the conditional probability of an idea following a period of silence is greater in status-equal groups than it is in status-differentiated groups. Finally, the conjecture that trust is a mediator of willingness to coact in silence is related to group structure.
