When Three’s a Crowd: How social structure affects the creation of organizational codes in triads

Communication codes shared among members of an organization facilitate coordination across sub-units. Yet, if groups interact separately, they will each develop a specialized code. Using laboratory experiments, we compare the process of code emergence in transitive and cyclical triads. We find that transitive structures hinder dyadic coordination at the start, in particular for groups consisting of strangers. Our findings suggest that the coordination difficulties in transitive triads may be explained by the difficulty to establish a behavioral common ground due to the asymmetry of such structure. These coordination problems are transient - groups of different structures end up with the same average communication performance if given sufficient time. However, there remain lasting differences in the code: transitive groups of strangers are more likely than cyclical groups to have multiple dyadic codes, which are less efficient than group level codes.