Calculating percentages of ‘I’ and ‘we’ pronouns used in homogeneous and heterogeneous group discussions confirmed our expectation. A relatively higher frequency of ‘we’ pronouns (64%) in comparison to ‘I’ (36%) was revealed in homogeneous group discussions. In heterogeneous groups ‘I’ and ‘we’ were not used significantly different (51% ‘I’ pronouns and 49% ‘we’ pronouns). In order to reassure the significance of this structure, a chi-square test (χ2) on ‘I’ and ‘we’ occurrences in the two groups was conducted.
The null hypothesis was that the counts of ‘I’ and ’we’ were independent from organizational background. The chi-square test (χ2), table 2 below, gave a test value of 70.56. We used the formula for the expected values for the probability of the joint occurrence of two independent givens in our case the occurrences of “I” and “we” within group discussions.
Eij = RiCj
N
Eij = expected frequency for a given cell in rows. Ri = row total, Cj = Column total, N = the total number of observations. The values that result (showed in parentheses) are those that would be expected if the variables were independent and the null hypothesis was true. A large discrepancy in the fit between expected and observed values would reflect a departure from independence, which is what we want to test.
We made calculation of chi-square (χ2) where O = observed values and E = expected values based upon the following chi-square (χ2) formula:
χ2 = (O-E)2
E
The chi-square distribution with one degree of freedom revealed that in order to reject the null hypothesis with error probability p < .005 the value had to be equal to, or larger than, 7.88. Thus, the null hypothesis was rejected. Focus group participants with a shared pre-merger organizational background had a collective point of view in their discussions and used ‘I’ less frequently than ‘We’. Heterogeneous groups used ‘I’ more than ‘We’. Our interpretation is that the recorded focus group data reflect less cultural synergy in heterogeneous groups than in homogeneous groups.