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Description
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The Diary Study (also known as The T.E.A.M. Study or The Progress Principle Study) was carried out in the late 1990s to early 2000s in order to probe the everyday work experiences of professionals working on important innovation projects within their companies. Teresa Amabile was the principal investigator. The database contains quantitative data and detailed categorical coding of qualitative data (not the verbatim qualitative data itself). Data were collected daily from the 238 professionals in 26 project teams who participated in this study throughout the entire course of a project (or discrete project phase) that required creativity – novel, useful ideas – in order to be successful. Many of the projects involved new product development. To the extent possible, daily data collection with a given team began on the first day of the project and continued until the last day. A large body of additional data on the individuals and their performance was collected at various other points during the study. The 26 teams were recruited from seven different companies in three industries: high tech, chemicals, and consumer products. Five of the companies had four teams that participated; one company had five teams; and one company had one team. (Please see the Metadata tab, below, for full description.)
The primary source of data is the Daily Questionnaire (DQ) diary form that each participant was emailed each workday, Monday through Friday, throughout the course of the project on which the participant’s team was working. Participants were asked to return the completed diary, which took most people 5-10 minutes to complete, shortly before the end of their workday. Most did complete the diary on the day that the diary referred to, but some habitually completed the diary early the next day. The overall response rate was 75%, yielding a total of 11,637 individual daily diary entries.
The DQ, which was identical for each day, contained questions calling for Likert-scale responses to questions about psychological state that day: (a) emotions; (b) motivation; and (c) perceptions of the project supervisor, the project team, the work environment, and the work itself. In addition, participants completed an open-ended question asking them to describe one event that stood out in their minds from the day that was relevant to the work in some way – the “Event Description” (ED) – and then answered additional Likert-scale questions about the event. The DQ included a few additional quantitative items.
Although the DQ forms collected both quantitative and qualitative data (the EDs), the raw qualitative data are not included in this database. All included data have been de-identified, and it was not possible to adequately disguise the qualitative data. However, this database contains codes from several different coding schemes that prior researchers using this database created to categorize the events (and attributes of events) that participants reported in their EDs. Of the two primary coding schemes, the Detailed Event Narrative Analysis (DENA) scheme is extremely detailed; the Broad Event Narrative Analysis (BENA) scheme is considerably less detailed. In addition, several LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) analyses of the EDs are included in this database.
A great deal of additional quantitative data was collected from all participants at various points in the study of their teams, including: demographics; personality; job satisfaction; cognitive style; motivational orientation; broad perceptions of the work environment, the project team, and the project; and monthly assessments of the performance of themselves and each of their teammates.
Data were also collected from multiple managers in the participant’s area of the organization, who were broadly familiar with projects in that area. These managers completed monthly surveys assessing each of the participating projects, as well as a set of comparable but non-participating projects, on several dimensions.
The book, The Progress Principle (Amabile, T. & Kramer, S., 2011, Harvard Business Publishing), reports a number of findings derived from quantitative and qualitative analyses of this database. The Research Appendix of this book contains descriptions (written in non-technical terms) of the Diary Study companies, participants, procedure, data collection instruments, data, and primary analyses conducted by Amabile and her colleagues. The Dataverse record lists several papers that used this database. Like the book, they can be used for additional information about the data collection methods and instruments as well as findings.
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Keyword
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Attitudes, Behavior, Business or Company Management, Collaborative Innovation and Invention, Creativity, Emotions, Employee Relationship Management, Everyday Work Life, Goals and Objectives, Groups and Teams, Happiness, Innovation Leadership, Interpersonal Communication, Leadership, LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), Management Practices and Processes, Managerial Roles, Management Skills, Mission and Purpose, Motivation and Incentives, Organizational Culture, Perception, Performance Effectiveness, Performance Productivity, Psychology, Resource Allocation, Time Management, Trust, Working Conditions |
