Digitally supported coaching and its application to developing self-organizing teams

Abstract Digital communication has become mainstream in professional as well as in educational collaboration. While it reduces the richness of non-verbal interaction, it also opened up novel, accessible, and low-cost opportunities for professional as well as personal development. This paper presents the findings of applying the framework called digitally supported coaching (DSC) to a self-organized team that partly collaborates via online video conferences. The DSC features a software tool that analyzes and visualizes communication data of several meetings and a team coaching process to use these visualizations for team development. This allows teams to discern helpful and less helpful patterns in their communication and to learn from that. While DSC has already been evaluated in multiple case studies in different contexts, this study explores the use of DSC for a self-organized team for the first time. Applying a mixed method approach, the team communication was analyzed from the subjective perspectives of the team members as well as based on the quantitative data of the meetings and the social network analysis (SNA) derived from it. Compared to hierarchical teams, the results show a much higher variety in team centralities and significant differences in the way meetings were led. Learnings by the team in this case included insights regarding their roleplay, the way they moderated meetings, and their development towards more constructive communication over time. The case indicates the potentials of DCS for self-organized teams particularly regarding their flexibility in taking on roles, tasks, and reflective practice.