Changes and sentiment: A longitudinal email analysis of a large design project

Abstract

Changes are part of any project. Although previous research provides methods to deal with changes, understanding of changes in relation to sentiment is still unclear. This is important as people's mood can affect performance and decisions. We implement an approach to quantify "change language" in emails and study its relation to sentiment. We find that sentiment decreases when problems or changes emerge, and increases when changes are implemented successfully. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and project engineering practice, providing avenues for further work.