Technical Communication Quarterly

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“Dude, that Sucks”: Examining Scrum’s Influence

on Empathy in Student Teams

Erin Friess & Chris Lam

To cite this article: Erin Friess & Chris Lam (2021) “Dude, that Sucks”: Examining Scrum’s
Influence on Empathy in Student Teams, Technical Communication Quarterly, 30:2, 189-203, DOI:
10.1080/10572252.2020.1803413

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1803413

Published online: 17 Aug 2020.

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TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY
2021, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 189–203
https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1803413

“Dude, that Sucks”: Examining Scrum’s Influence on Empathy in

Student Teams
Erin Friess and Chris Lam
University of North Texas

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The role of empathy in student team collaborations in technical and profes­ Agile; empathy; Scrum;
sional communication has been understudied. In this mixed methods study, collaboration
we assess how Scrum affects both student perceptions of empathy and
student use of empathetic strategies. We found that students who used
Scrum considered themselves to be no more empathetic than students
who did not use Scrum. However, a discourse analysis revealed that students
who used Scrum deployed significantly more empathetic strategies than
students who did not use Scrum.

Introduction
Collaboration has long been hailed as a critical skill for technical communicators (Batova & Andersen,
2017; Bekins & Williams, 2006; Brumberger & Lauer, 2015; Jones, 2007; Rainey, Turner, & Dayton,
2005), and, as such, collaboration within the technical and professional communication (TPC) class­
room has been carefully assessed for best practices and communicative techniques (Brewer & Holmes,
2016; Lam, 2013, 2018; Oakley, Hanna, Kuzmyn, & Felder, 2007; Wolfe & Alexander, 2005).
One aspect of communicative collaboration that has been understudied by TPC researchers is the
role of empathy in collaborative sessions. Empathy is a complex concept that involves how one
person’s reactions to the experiences of others “become manifested in a deeper understanding of
others” (Strobel, Hess, Pan, & Wachter Morris, 2013, p. 139). TPC scholars have typically explored
empathy in terms of designer/writer empathy with end users, often from a design thinking perspective
(Barker & Gower, 2010; Bekins & Williams, 2006; Patterson, 2015; Pope-Ruark, Tham, Moses, &
Conner, 2019) or from a “technical communicator as advocate” paradigm (Jones, 2016b, 2017; Rose &
Cardinal, 2018).
What the TPC field has yet to explore is empathy among teammates to improve collaborations.
Other fields have learned that empathy is often a characteristic of successful leaders at all levels of the
workplace, though this characteristic may not always be recognized as such (Gentry, Weber, & Sadri,
2007; Holt & Marques, 2012; Slater, 2008; Young, 2015). Furthermore, studies have found that
empathy leads to trust (David & Golan, 2017; Jones & George, 1998; Smith, MacKenzie, & Meyers,
2014), which can lead to important foundations for long-term collaborations and which in turn can
allow groups to recover from trust disruption (Bagdasarov, Connelly, & Johnson, 2019; David &
Golan, 2017).
One collaborative process that has been reported to be empathetic is Scrum, a particular implementa­
tion of agile principles in which teams work in timeboxed sprints with several required meetings, such as
the daily stand-up meeting, and tasks, such as the production of a Scrum board (Akarsu, Metin, Gungor,
& Yilmaz, 2018; Goldstein, 2013; Jurado-Navas & Munoz-Luna, 2017; Takpuie & Tanner, 2016). Scrum,
which began as a software development process but is now used across many industries (Alliance, 2017),

CONTACT Erin Friess erin.friess@unt.edu Department of Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX
© 2020 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
190 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

is a relatively egalitarian form of workplace teamwork (Friess, 2018, 2019; Royle & Nikolic, 2016), and
empathy is a baseline skill needed for most Scrum teams to successfully transfer knowledge (Goldstein,
2013; Jurado-Navas & Munoz-Luna, 2017; Takpuie & Tanner, 2016; Tietz & Monch, 2015).
Furthermore, previous studies have found that while students routinely view group work negatively
(Pope-Ruark, Eichel, Talbott, & Thornton, 2011; Smith et al., 2011), students who work in Scrum sprints
attribute Scrum practices to successful collaborations (Pope-Ruark, 2012, 2015).
While the end goal of our research is to ascertain whether empathy might positively affect outcomes of
student collaboration, we must first learn if empathy can be somewhat organically encouraged within
student collaboration activities. Therefore, to take this first step, we conducted a quasi-experimental
classroom study in two sections of an upper-division TPC class which worked within a Scrum environ­
ment while two other sections of the same class did not. We asked two research questions:

R1. Do students in a Scrum-directed project perceive of their own empathy differently than students in
a non-Scrum-directed project?

R2. Do students in a Scrum-directed project use more empathetic language in their group interactions
than students in a non-Scrum-directed project?

The results stemming from these questions could suggest that the incorporation of Scrum into the
TPC classroom, a presumably arduous task for instructors, could yield a more empathetic groupwork
experience that, in turn, could potentially be more rewarding for both students and instructors. In the
sections that follow, we highlight previous research on empathy, collaboration, and Scrum, we outline
our methods of data collection, and we present the findings from our analysis.

Literature review
To fully position this study, we look to prior research on empathy, collaboration in TPC classrooms,
and Scrum.

Empathy
Empathy has been extensively studied in such fields as healthcare, nursing, and social work (Brunero,
Lamont, & Coates, 2010; Gerdes & Segal, 2011; Gibbons, 2011; Lamothe, Rondeau, Malboeuf-
Hurtubise, Duval, & Sultan, 2016; Raab, 2014; Yu & Kirk, 2008). While empathy has been less studied
in TPC and TPC-adjacent fields, it is a concept that is receiving growing attention. Primarily, these
studies have had two approaches: 1) explore how empathy enables the writer/designer to more fully
understand and appreciate the audience/end user and to better write/design for that group (Barker &
Gower, 2010; Bekins & Williams, 2006; De Jong & Lentz, 2007; Jones, 2016a; Patterson, 2015; Petersen,
2017; Pope-Ruark et al., 2019), and 2) explore how empathy empowers technical communicators to act
as social change advocates (Jones, 2016b, 2017; Rose & Cardinal, 2018).
However, largely missing from TPC’s body of knowledge are studies that investigate how
empathy affects groupwork. Groupwork throughout higher education can cause strife and stress
for students (White, Lloyd, Kennedy, & Stewart, 2005), but empathy has been found to be
a desirable characteristic for seamless groupwork (Hillyard, Gillespie, & Littig, 2010). A few studies
begin to mark this path both within TPC and in TPC-adjacent fields. For example, several studies in
business communication have explored how emotional intelligence, which expands empathy to
include such topics as expression, self-control, and conflict resolution, affect groupwork (e.g.,
Ioannidou & Konstantikaki, 2008; Sigmar, Hynes, & Hill, 2012; Yost & Tucker, 2000).
Additionally, Clark et al. use discourse analysis to explore how empathetic language used by call
center representatives moderated the tensions in customer calls (Clark, Murfett, Rogers, & Ang,
2013). Further, Harris and Harris (1996), though not referencing empathy directly, found that
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 191

successful teams show care, warm feelings, friendliness, and support to one another when con­
fronted with difficulties. Ganegoda and Bordia (2019) found that empathy in workplace interactions
“can have a significant effect on individual well-being, interpersonal relationships, and organiza­
tional outcomes” (p. 788). Strobel et al. (2013) found that empathy in engineering contexts primarily
related to empathy with clients and end-users, but some engineers in semi-structured interviews
reported that empathy affects teamwork because it “promotes more participation of all members” of
a group and can lead to better outcomes (p. 156). These studies suggest that the promotion of
empathy in collaborative environments has the potential to cultivate a more palatable experience
that may reduce some of the stresses brought upon by groupwork (Hillyard et al., 2010).
The study reported in this article continues these previous lines of TPC research by investigating
how interlocutors use empathy within a project management workspace and how they perceive of
their own empathic nature through self-reported mechanisms. In the present study, the population
under investigation shifts from workplace environments to the classroom where future workers might
learn the skills of successful collaboration. We acknowledge that there are endless possible definitions
for empathy; for this study we borrow our definition from Strobel et al. (2013): “the ability to
understand what another person is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other
person” (p. 138).

Collaboration in TPC classrooms

Collaboration continues to be a well-studied and core aspect of the TPC classroom (Barton & Heiman,
2012; Cook, 2002; Lam, 2018; Thomas & McShane, 2007). In an early study, Thompson (2001) found
that nearly half of all research on collaboration in the field of TPC was conducted in a classroom. The
classroom has been, and continues to be, an important research site for TPC researchers. Some of the
early research on teamwork in the classroom has focused on establishing learning outcomes related to
teamwork (Breuch, 2005; Paretti, McNair, & Holloway-Attaway, 2007). Despite the prevalence of
collaboration in TPC classes, students often struggle with various team-related problems, such as poor
communication (Lam, 2013), social loafing and slacking (Lam, 2015), lack of instructor support
(Oakley et al., 2007), anxiety related to critiquing classmates (Fredrick, 2008), and previous poor
groupwork experiences (Pfaff & Huddleston, 2003).
In addition to the challenges faced by students in team projects, research shows that some
instructors are also not equipped to deal with challenges of group projects. For instance, in
a large study of over 6,000 students, only 30% reported “a lot” of instructor guidance and 20% of
respondents reported no instructor guidance at all. Some research in TPC has moved beyond
defining the problems associated with teamwork and into examining, testing, and refining inter­
ventions that allow instructors to set up teams for success. Probably the most widely adopted
resource around teamwork in TPC is Wolfe’s (2017) book, Team Writing, where she helpfully
provides templates, discourse strategies, and other resources for team success. Specific to the
problem of slacking in team projects, Wolfe and Powell (2014) provided discourse-level strategies
for dealing with slackers . Similarly, Lam (2016) tested the efficacy of a media choice training
protocol for reducing slacking in team projects. Lam (2018) has also examined how appealing to
data helps team leaders make decisions and handle conflict with team members. Also related to team
leader interventions, Campbell and Lam (2019) examined how data-driven peer feedback positively
impacted students’ overall perceptions of group effectiveness. Finally, Brewer and Holmes (2016)
provided instructors with a communication exercise that led to positive teamwork outcomes and
increased communication awareness.
The present study continues this on-going pursuit of improving collaborative experiences in the
TPC classroom by looking at how students use empathy in their collaborations and how they perceive
of their state of empathy.
192 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

Scrum
To study empathy in a TPC classroom, we elected to introduce a Scrum project management process
to half of the participants. Scrum is a particular implementation of agile, a project-management
process that eschews working in a series of siloed sequences to deliver a large final product in favor of
a process that empowers interactive groups to incrementally deliver value (Moran, 2015). Agile
employs “highly communicative teams that share their experiences and tacit knowledge in order to
gain consensus regarding the solution” (Moran, 2015, p. 4).
Scrum is a stylized implementation of the agile framework that gives a defined structure to the
general principles presented in the Agile Manifesto (Manifesto for Agile Software Development,
2001). Scrum involves team members working through a timeboxed sprint with a defined begin­
ning and end (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2017). One team member serves as the ScrumMaster. The
ScrumMaster does not have management authority but is responsible for enforcing Scrum rules
and removing obstacles for team members (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2017). The team works
through a variety of meetings throughout the sprint, including a planning meeting (in which
user stories are developed and definitions of done, the team-defined exit-criteria for the item, are
assigned), a review meeting (in which team members demonstrate their definitions of done to the
stakeholders, who are external to the Scrum team and are typically the clients who are paying for
the development), a retrospective meeting (in which team members identify strategic changes to
process that could improve the next sprint), and daily stand-ups (also called daily Scrums)
(Moran, 2015; Rubin, 2012; Schwaber & Sutherland, 2017). Daily stand-ups are integral to the
ongoing communicative goals of Scrum. In these stand-up meetings, which are meant to last no
longer than about 15 minutes (or a reasonable amount of time for most people to literally stand
up), all team members relate three items: 1) What they have accomplished since the last stand-up
meeting, 2) What they aim to accomplish before the next stand-up meeting, and 3) Any obstacles
they have encountered in their pursuit of definitions of done. We encourage readers who want to
learn more about the specific aspects of implementing a Scrum structure to review the many
resources dedicated to the subject (e.g., Moran, 2015; Rubin, 2012; Schwaber & Sutherland, 2017).
We selected Scrum to be the intervention with which to attempt to introduce empathy to TPC project
teams for several reasons. First, while Scrum began as a project-management approach for software
development, it has now been adopted by many industries, including industries that often include technical
communicators (Hron & Obwegeser, 2018; Hummel, 2014; Johnson, 2017a, 2017b; State of Scrum
2017–2018: Scaling and Agile Transformation, 2017). Therefore, Scrum is a project-management strategy
that many students may encounter in their post-education careers and introduction to its hallmarks could
potentially provide long-term benefit to students even if it doesn’t stimulate empathy.
Second, Scrum has been found to be a rather egalitarian project-management process that can enable
equity in the participation of team members, a characteristic generally desired in student project groups
(Bruno et al., 2011; Friess, 2019). Indeed, Scrum implementation in student groups has been found to provide
“a rule based egalitarian pedagogic space that promotes learner agency” (Royle & Nikolic, 2016, p. 45).
Third, previous studies have located empathy both within workplace and student group Scrums. In terms
of workplace empathy, Takpuie and Tanner (2016) found in an interview-based study of software developers
that demonstrations of empathy made “Scrum team members more motivated and willing to transfer
knowledge,” a crucial communicative act in these multidisciplinary teams (p. 49). Additionally, these inter­
views revealed that team members who demonstrated empathy encouraged others to be “more willing to
listen patiently” (p. 49) and were found by others to be more “appealing” (p. 52). Further, Tietz and Monch
(2015), in their observational study of distributed Scrum teams, found that teams with members who actively
demonstrated empathy had more efficient knowledge transfers.
In terms of student group empathy, Jurado-Navas and Munoz-Luna (2017) found that students
organized into Scrums self-reported improved empathy in pre- and post-intervention interviews.
Additionally, Pope-Ruark (2014), in her experience reports of using Scrum in TPC classrooms,
specifically points to student daily stand-ups, also referred to as daily Scrums, as valuable venues
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 193

that “keep everyone accountable and encourage team members to help one another, thus limiting
potential egoism or competition” through the “camaraderie” establish through this standardized
meeting (p. 331). To that end, Pope-Ruark (2012) actively uses some daily Scrums as opportunities
for students to boost other students’ morale by explicitly encouraging students to recognize each
member’s contribution to the project.
These studies suggest that Scrum has the potential to increase empathy in groupwork, which in
turn, could allow for a more pleasant and grounded groupwork experience. However, previous studies
did not have the methodological structure to determine if Scrum affects empathy in student group­
work. Therefore, to empirically ascertain whether the introduction of Scrum into the groupwork of
advanced TPC students affects student perceptions of their own empathy as well as their use of
empathy-driven language, we designed a quasi-experimental study that compared the outcomes from
students in Scrum-based groups to students in control groups. The outcomes of these assessments
could help instructors determine if the incorporation of Scrum into the classroom as outlined by Pope-
Ruark (2012, 2015) could be a worthy investment for the sake of empathetic and functional teams.

Method
In order to learn more about Scrum and empathy in collaborative teams, we conducted a quasi-
experimental study in four advanced TPC courses at a large public university with over 35,000
students in the Southern U.S. The study was approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board.
In the four sections of the upper division undergraduate course, a total of 80 students elected to
participate in the study. These students were primarily non-TPC majors. A plurality of students were
computer science majors (n = 24), followed by biology (n = 21), English (n = 12), and TPC (n = 6). If
students completed the final survey in its entirety, they became eligible to win a gift card, in which they
had a 1:10 chance of winning. Seventy-seven students completed the final survey. Thirty-one students
were in classes without the Scrum intervention, and they were organized into eight teams. Forty-nine
of the students were in classes with the Scrum intervention, and they were organized into 13 teams.

Sample
The four advanced TPC classes were taught by two experienced instructors who each taught two
sections. Students in all four sections had previously taken and passed an introduction to technical
writing class, but the course was open to students in all majors. Both instructors coordinated to use the
same team project requirements and timeline. Students were asked to complete a survey by CATME,
a service that aims to organize students into cohesive teams by considering work schedules, class
schedules, and commutes among other factors. Student groups were then composed by CATME.

Procedure
Before beginning the team project, one of the two classes taught by each instructor was randomly
selected to be the experimental group who received the Scrum intervention. The other two classes
acted as the control group. Every class, regardless of whether they were placed in the experimental or
control group, received a 30-minute lecture- and exercise-based instruction on the best practices of
team communication in order to establish a baseline and equal level of instruction. All teams were then
instructed to develop a team charter that outlined their communicative practices for the length of the
project. Teams were asked to use Slack as their primary communicative medium, but students were
also encouraged to use other media (i.e., SMS, e-mail) in addition to Slack if warranted. The
instructors of the courses were members of the Slack channels and monitored student participation
and engagement.
To test the impact of Scrum on the team project, we kept everything identical in regards to instructor
intervention between the Scrum and No-Scrum classes. The only difference between Scrum and No-Scrum
194 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

classes was that the Scrum classes were given a 30-minute lecture followed by a 30-minute activity on the
practice of Scrum as a project management process. Students in the class with the Scrum intervention were
taught the hallmarks of Scrum project management, but students were not specifically taught the best
practices of each hallmark to avoid inadvertently providing additional teamwork instruction that could have
been denied the No-Scrum classes. Each team selected a ScrumMaster, held a kickoff meeting at the
beginning of the project, and held a retrospective at the end of the first project. Additionally, students
were instructed to maintain a Scrum board on Slack (which included the user stories they developed in their
kickoff meetings) and were to hold their daily (Monday through Friday) stand-ups on Slack.
Traditional Scrum processes involve face-to-face daily stand-ups, but distributed groups and asyn­
chronous stand-up meetings have become common (Ganis, Surdek, & Woodward, 2009; Pries-Heje &
Pries-Heje, 2011; Sutherland, Viktorov, Blount, & Puntikov, 2007). Each ScrumMaster determined what
time all team members would need to have completed their stand-up each day on Slack. In the daily
stand-up, all team members would individually report three things: 1) What they had accomplished since
the previous stand-up, 2) What they will accomplish before the next stand-up, and 3) Any obstacles
faced. The ScrumMaster would attempt to remove those obstacles; if the ScrumMaster struggled to
remove the obstacles, they would turn to the instructor, who took on the role of the product owner, to
remove the obstacles. In Scrum, a product owner represents the interests of the key stakeholders within
a Scrum project and typically provides a team with overarching vision and ongoing motivation.
The seven-week student team project was divided into two phases. In the first phase, students developed
and launched a survey in Qualtrics. In the second phase, students analyzed the data collected from the
survey and wrote a report to a decision-maker.

Data analysis
The data for this study comes from two places. First, at the completion of the project, students who
elected to participate in the study were asked to complete a 20-minute comprehensive survey with one
section dedicated to concerns of empathy. Students who completed the survey were entered into
a drawing for a gift card in which they held a 1:10 chance of winning. The 16 empathy-centric
questions were taken from the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, which has been found to have “high
internal consistency [and] construct validity” (Spreng, McKinnon, Mar, & Levine, 2009, p. 69). In this
questionnaire, participants were asked to react to the statements on a Likert scale. We made two minor
modifications to the statements. First, since we asked the students to think specifically about their
interactions during the project, we altered the statements from the present tense to the past tense.
Second, again because we were asking about a specific set of interactions, we changed the broad term
of “people” to “team members.” For example, a statement that originally read “I enjoy making other
people feel better” was slightly altered to be “I enjoyed making other team members feel better.”
All survey data was analyzed by comparing the aggregate average score on the Toronto Empathy
Questionnaire for the experimental and control groups. We used an independent samples t-test
determine whether the difference in empathy between the groups was statistically significant.
Second, we collected communications from the Slack channels the students used for collaborations as
well as the open responses from post-project self- and teammate evaluations to gauge how empathetic
language emerged in those environments. We modified an existing coding system of empathetic language in
communication (which focused on patient and physician interactions) to conduct a discourse analysis on
the empathetic language of the students (Krystallidou et al., 2018). This coding scheme rejects a binary
approach to empathy assessment and assumes that all responses that acknowledge an utterance and do not
outright ignore an utterance inherently possess some amount of empathy; thus, according to this coding
scheme some utterances that do not necessarily embody what is commonly thought of as empathetic
language are coded as empathetic because the response utterance doesn’t ignore the original utterance
(Krystallidou et al., 2018). Table 1 summarizes the coding system. All the examples in Table 1 come from the
data set in response to one student of a group indicating that they were sick.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 195

Table 1. Descriptions of empathetic language.

Type of Empathy Description Sample Response
Perfunctory Team member gives an automatic, scripted response, giving the Got it.
Recognition empathy opportunity minimal recognition.
Implicit Team member doesn’t explicitly recognize the empathy Are you gonna miss the deadline?
recognition opportunity but focuses on a side matter related to the
empathy opportunity
Acknowledgment Team member acknowledges the issue in the empathy That sucks.
opportunity but does not pursue the topic
Pursuit Team member explicitly acknowledges the central issue and Some honey and tea might make your
asks follow-up questions or offers advice or support throat feel better.
Shared feeling or Team member makes an explicit statement that he or she either Oh man, I had the flu last year, and I was
experience shares the emotion or has had a similar experience, challenge, out of it for at least a week, and it was
or progress. rough.

Initially, one author and one other coder independently assessed 10% of each source. The data set
was broken down into turns and sentences. Each rater first indicated whether each turn had one or
more empathy markers within in it. If a turn was indicated to include empathy markers, each rater
then gave a single empathy code to each sentence within the turn that possessed empathy markers.
Raters in the initial norming session had a 0.94 agreement (very good agreement) on empathetic turns
and a 0.74 agreement (good agreement) on specific empathy strategies in sentences through
a calculated Krippendorff’s Alpha (Watt & Van den Berg, 1995). After the initial norming session,
the raters coded a second set of data from 20% of the data set. The raters’ agreement increased to 0.95
on empathetic turns and 0.79 on specific empathetic markers in sentences.

Results
Survey results of empathy
To determine whether there were differences between the group who received Scrum training and the
control group, we conducted an independent samples t-test, which compares the mean scores for each
group. As stated previously, empathy was measured using a 16-question construct (the Toronto
Empathy Questionnaire). The results from the t-test indicated that there was no statistical difference
between the two groups. The group who received Scrum training reported a slightly higher average
empathy score (M = 5.01) than the group who did not receive training (M = 4.92). However, this
difference was not statistically significant (t = 0.53, p = .47).

Empathetic language
Additionally, we assessed language from students’ Slack channels and their post-project evaluations. One
author, who participated in the inter-rater reliability norming, coded the entire dataset in MAXQDA.
Across the 21 teams, there were a total of 1,922 turns, which averaged 91.5 turns per team. A total of 205
turns included some kind of empathy strategy, which meant that across all the teams, 10.7% of the total
turns included at least one empathy strategy. An example of the coding of the turns is in Table 2.
Empathy differences are evident between the Scrum teams (who held an initial kickoff meeting and
a project closing retrospective meeting and who hosted a Scrum board and daily stand-ups on Slack)
and the No-Scrum teams (who were instructed to use Slack as their primary communicative medium
but were given no further guidelines on how to use Slack). Descriptive statistics about the teams’ usage
of empathy in their turns is summarized in Table 3.
A chi square analysis shows a significant association between Scrum and the use of at least one
empathetic strategy (X2 = 18.16, p < .001). Table 4 provides a summary these results. Furthermore, all
Scrum teams had at least two turns with one or more empathy strategy and five of the 13 Scrum teams
had at least 20 turns with one or more empathy strategy, for an average of 14.4 turns with one or more
196 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

Table 2. Example of empathy coding in turns and sentences.

Student Turn Empathy in Sentence Type of Empathy in
# Number Turn? Number Sentence Content
Student 1 No empathy 1 No Code Y’all, im [sic] gonna be late to our meeting.
1 2 No Code I got rear-ended on the way in.
Student 2 Yes empathy 1 Acknowledgment Dude, that sucks.
2 2 Shared Experience I was in an accident in over [sic] the summer and
I was shaky for days.
Student 3 Yes empathy 1 Pursuit Are you okay?
3
Student 4 No code 1 No Code Thanks y’all.
1 2 No Code Im [sic] doing ok and ill [sic] be on campus soon.

Table 3. Summary of empathy strategy usage by Scrum and No Scrum Teams.

Scrum Teams No Scrum Teams
Average number of turns per team 116.5 turns 51 turns
Average number of turns with one or 14.4 turns 2.25 turns
more empathy strategy per team
Percentage breakdown of all the turns 91.2% of turns with one or more empathy 8.8% of turns with one or more empathy
with one or more empathy strategy strategy were from Scrum Teams strategy were from No Scrum Teams

Table 4. Summary of empathetic strategy frequency.

1 or more empathetic strategies No empathetic strategies % of empathetic turns
Scrum 187 1508 12.4%*
No Scrum 18 409 4.4%

empathy strategy per team. As for the teams that did not use Scrum, three of the eight teams had no
empathy strategies present at all in their turns.
The distribution of the empathetic turns is distinctive between the Scrum and No-Scrum teams. For
the No-Scrum teams, 50% of the turns that included an empathetic strategy were deployed by only
6.5% of the students. Over 65% (n = 21) of the students on the No-Scrum teams made no empathetic
statement. On the Scrum teams, the distribution was more even. Only 20% (n = 10) of the students on
the Scrum teams made no empathetic statement. For both the Scrum and the No-Scrum teams,
a single turn that included an empathetic strategy was within 5 turns of another empathetic strategy
about 80% of the time.
Specific empathy strategies were assessed by sentences within turns, as shown in Table 2. Of the
4,893 total sentences in the 1,922 turns, 205 sentences were found to have a specific empathy
strategy. By far, the most common type of empathy strategy used by the teams was
Acknowledgment, in which the team member acknowledges the issue in the empathy opportunity
but does not pursue the topic. Acknowledgment is a milder empathetic response to an utterance
than more overly empathetic responses such as Pursuit or Shared Feeling or Experience. For
students who are interacting in an environment with unknown teammates for a short time frame,
acknowledgment is a reasonable response and likely the first response needed for more emotionally
invested responses. Acknowledgment was used in 75.6% of the sentences that demonstrated
empathy. Of the sentences that included Acknowledgment, 92.3% were found in sentences from
Scrum teams, with 8.7% of the Acknowledgment sentences coming from No-Scrum teams.
The second most common type of empathy strategy was Shared Experience or Feeling, in which
the team member makes an explicit statement that they either share the emotion or have had
a similar experience, challenge, or progress. Shared Experience or Feeling was found in 5.4% of the
sentences that demonstrated empathy. All (100%) of the sentences that included Shared Experience
or Feeling came from the Scrum teams.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 197

Discussion
This initial study of the use of Scrum to produce empathetic interactions has several takeaways.
First, R1 asked, “Do students in a Scrum-directed project perceive of their own empathy differently
than students in a non-Scrum-directed project?” The results of the self-reported survey suggest that the
Scrum intervention did not have a statistically significant effect on the degree of empathy reported by the
students. Students in the Scrum intervention reported to be approximately equally empathetic as
students in the control No-Scrum group. This finding suggests that an implementation of Scrum did
not make students more acutely aware of their own empathetic maneuvers, as the students self-report the
same levels of empathy regardless of their Scrum team status. There are a variety of potential explanations
for this finding. One possible explanation can be attributed to the self-reported nature of this part of the
study. A classic disadvantage of self-reported survey data is social desirability bias, which argues that
respondents will often answer questions in the way they think is socially acceptable or will be viewed
favorably by society (Edwards, 1957). This bias would, in our estimation, be amplified in a survey about
empathy because it is such a socially desirable trait. That is, there are few instances where an individual
would want to be perceived, or to perceive themselves, as unempathetic or uncaring toward others.
Another possible explanation is that the construct used to measure empathy was not directly
relevant to the context in which this study was conducted. While we attempted to contextualize the
questions by specifically adding language about team members to the 16 survey questions, some of the
questions may have addressed situations that were not relevant to many participants in the study. For
instance, one question (among other potentially irrelevant questions) read “If a team member started
to talk about his or her problems, I tried to steer the conversation towards something else.” This
question could be potentially difficult to self-report if, in fact, this situation never happened in a group.
Previous research on teamwork in higher education has pointed to the uniqueness of groupwork in
that projects that occur as part of a course are typically shorter in length and the team lifecycle is much
shorter than for teams in an actual workplace. Since team projects are shorter and teams typically
disband after a single project, students often don’t connect in the same way teammates might in an
actual workplace. Therefore, the opportunity to practice empathy in the specific ways that the Toronto
questionnaire asks about may be lower due to the constraints of the student team project. Yet, as we’ll
discuss in the following section, students who participated in a Scrum-directed project indeed did use
more empathetic language.
Second, R2 asked: Do students in a Scrum-directed project use more empathetic language in their
group interactions than students in a non-Scrum-directed project? The results of the discourse
analysis suggest that students in the Scrum intervention did use significantly more empathetic
language than students in the control No-Scrum group. This finding is particularly intriguing in
light of the result of the first research question. While student self-reports don’t reflect variations in
student perceptions of their own empathy, our mixed method approach enables us to verify that the
students on teams using Scrum employed significantly more empathetic language in their written
interactions than students on teams that did not use Scrum. This suggests that Scrum is a project-
management process that invisibly, rather than overtly, promotes empathy. While the students on the
No-Scrum teams self-reported to be equally empathetic to the Scrum teams, their language choices did
not include empathetic strategies. One potential explanation is that Scrum groups simply met more
often and therefore were afforded more opportunities to use empathetic language. This is certainly
a possibility, but the statistical analysis compared the language choices proportionally. Thus, even
though Scrum groups were communicating more frequently, they also proportionally used more
empathetic language.
Another possible explanation is that the more frequent communication allowed students to develop
deeper connections, which in turn led to more off-topic conversations and opportunities for empathy.
In a study of text messaging in student teams, Lam (2013) found that social connectedness increased as
communication frequency increased, which seems to support this explanation. While this study
doesn’t specifically identify what aspect of the Scrum process potentially made students more
198 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

empathetic in their language exchanges, it is possible that the required daily stand-up meetings, in
which students identified what they had done since the last stand-up, what they would do before the
next stand-up, and what obstacles they were facing, enabled opportunities for students to express
empathy that they otherwise would not have shared with their fellow classmates. In the following
example, one team member on a Scrum team explains that she has other priorities, then another team
member empathizes, and then the first team member reciprocates the empathy.
Team Member A: Sounds good to me. I wont [sic] be able to put any questions [in] tonight because
I have a presentation and [a] test in the morning, but I can tomorrow!
Team Member B: I hate prez. Good luck! I have a prez tomorrow night thats [sic] gonna hurt but I can
work on the questions tonight.
Team Member A: Yeah. Presentations are the worst. Mine is a group one. If you need to work on your
presentation we [have] some time before we need to turn this in.
Another example demonstrates a similar pattern:
Team Member J: My manager just asked me to work another shift tonight . . . I wont [sic] be getting in
til [sic] 2. Could someone make sure the report is up by midnight[?]
[. . .]
Team Member K: Sure! Last minute shifts are rough. I’ll upload when I get off at 10.
[. . .]
Team Member J: [Y]ou have a late night too. Hope tomorrow is an easy day for you.
Similar statements made by team members on a No-Scrum team often had no response or acknowl­
edge of the statement. This is shown in the following two examples.
Team Member X: Guys, I have a ton of work to do for bio plus a big test. Could someone work on
distribution?
Team Member Y: Tonight I’m going to add the demo questions.
Team Member Z: Were [sic] in good shape.
Team Member M: Woah [sic]. Today was intense. I’m gonna miss class tomorrow bc I need to take my
kid to the doctor. Would someone fill me in on what she says?
Team Member N: The project is due in a week.
Team Member P: Are we meeting before class?
It’s possible that the framework of the daily stand-up with its three on-going questions inherently
invited opportunities for empathetic strategies, while the No-Scrum teams without the required daily
stand-ups and structure to interactions denied students possible entry into empathetic statements.
Further, the distribution of the empathetic strategies among the team members was more evenly
distributed among the Scrum teams than the No-Scrum teams. For the No-Scrum teams, empathy was
only rarely demonstrated in the language choices, which suggests that for No-Scrum teams, empathy
was not a characteristic necessary for collaboration. For the Scrum teams, empathy was used in
approximately 10% of the total turns by approximately 80% of the students on the teams, suggesting
that empathy was an anticipated aspect of collaboration. Furthermore, we found that approximately
80% of the time a turn included an empathetic strategy, another turn with an empathetic strategy
could be found within five turns, as the previous examples from the Scrum teams exhibit. This pattern
suggests that demonstrations of empathy beget additional demonstrations of empathy, and, with the
daily stand-up providing structure and entry for empathetic strategies, Scrum processes enable a more
empathetic project experience.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 199

Conclusions, limitations, and future research

This study has been an initial exploration of whether the introduction of Scrum into student
collaborations encourages empathy among those collaborators. Our mixed-method study found that
students participating in a Scrum-based project do not self-report higher levels of empathy than
students who complete the same project without a Scrum intervention. However, we also found that
students on Scrum teams demonstrated more empathetic turns and empathetic strategies in their
communication exchanges than those students not on Scrum teams. Given that prior studies have
found empathy to be a useful characteristic for strong leadership and successful collaborations
(Bagdasarov et al., 2019; David & Golan, 2017; Gentry et al., 2007; Holt & Marques, 2012; Jones &
George, 1998; Slater, 2008; Smith et al., 2014; Young, 2015), our study suggests that Scrum might be
a way to encourage empathetic collaborations. However, Scrum’s empathetic effect on collaborators
may be potentially undetectable by collaborators, given that students considered themselves equally
empathetic regardless of their Scrum team status.
This study, careful in its creation and claims, is limited by at least three issues that provide
opportunities for additional research. First, this was a small quasi-experimental study of stu­
dents. As with any field-based experimental study, the potential for confounding variables is
present. However, we intentionally designed the study with a single independent variable, the
Scrum intervention, and made efforts to keep all other aspects of the classes identical.
Additionally, the results should not be extrapolated to Scrum groups at large. Other groups of
students at differing types of institutions along with industry-based work groups should be
examined to ascertain validity across groups. Second, this study looked carefully at the empathy
self-reports of students and students’ written statements within Slack and in their post-project
teammate evaluations. Missing from this analysis are the spoken exchanges among students. It
may be that empathetic strategies were deployed with more regularity during face-to-face meet­
ings. We encourage future research on how empathy varies among group members in their
spoken exchanges. Finally, we didn’t ask students to evaluate how they perceived the empathetic
overtures (or lack of overtures) by their fellow team members. It could be true that some of the
ways we’ve coded and operationalized empathy were simply perceived as politeness by team
members. Additionally, it may be that students avoided using empathetic strategies because they
did not value empathetic strategies put forth by others. We encourage further investigation of
how empathetic strategies are perceived both by those who deploy empathetic strategies and
those who receive empathetic strategies.
This study suggests that Scrum is a viable process to introduce empathetic language into student
collaborations. Additional future research that extends from this current study might explore how
empathy affects product outcomes, group cohesion, and group satisfaction. Additionally, future
research could also assess if a project-management process that adopts only the daily stand-ups
maintains similar amounts of empathy strategies as a full Scrum project-management process.
Finally, additional research could investigate whether the structure of Scrum, particularly the daily
stand-up, enables students to successfully navigate disagreements rather than skirt problematic issues,
which often results in more protracted group drama. Such research could also reveal whether Scrum-
based groupwork produces fewer slackers because Scrum forces communicative opportunities for
empathy, which in turn could increase the psychological safety of the entire team.

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Meesha Thomas for her cooperation with this project.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
200 E. FRIESS AND C. LAM

Notes on contributors
Erin Friess received her Ph.D. degree in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She is an
Associate Professor of Technical Communication with the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, USA. Her research
investigates language and decision-making in the workplace, the differing research needs of academics and practitioners,
and curricular and pedagogical best practices for technical communication educators.
Chris Lam (M’16) received the Ph.D. degree in Technical Communication and the M.S. degree in Information Design
from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. He is an associate professor in the Department of
Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. He studies communication in team projects,
examines the literature on professional and technical communication and its impact on the profession, and applies data
from social media to practical and pedagogical issues in technical and professional communication.

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