Teams Perform Better When They Make Progress Together Through Talk

Effective team communication depends not only on what is said but also on whether each exchange advances task execution. This study developed an utterance-level progress metric to characterize communication as forward, backward, sideways, or pause and examined its relationship with team performance. Forty-eight participants completed a cooperative, time-constrained defusal task, yielding 95 cases. Speech acts and progress were coded from transcripts with strong interrater reliability for speech acts (κ = 0.83) and moderate reliability for progress (κ = 0.60). Good-performance cases showed more forward progress and less backward and sideways progress than poor-performance cases. Poor performance was also associated with a higher prevalence of information requests, while pause utterances were longer during good performance. Adding progress variables significantly improved a speech-act-only classification model, although cross-validated improvement was inconclusive. These findings suggest that speech acts and utterance-by-utterance progress provide complementary indicators of team coordination and performance.