Abstract
Abstract Organizations in today’s global economy face continual pressures to remain responsive to changes in the competitive marketplace. One way that firms have adapted to these pressures is to use web-based communication technologies to support virtual project teams. To better understand the effectiveness of these dispersed teams, we have analyzed the transcripts of eight virtual design teams composed of graduate students in information systems. Using a coding scheme based on design rationale concepts, we compare and contrast the communication activities of high and low performing virtual teams working on the early stages of software design. Our results suggest that the high performing virtual teams significantly out-communicated the low performing virtual teams. High performing teams communicated more regarding design alternatives. They also spent considerably more effort summarizing their work and discussing the write-up of the final design deliverable. The leaders of high performance teams had more communication content than leaders of low performing teams.
Highlights
Organizations in today’s global economy face continual pressures to remain responsive to changes in the competitive marketplace
This paper presents results of a detailed content analysis of the computer-based communication transcripts for eight experimental virtual design teams: four high-performing virtual design teams are compared to four low-performing virtual design teams
The research hypotheses were tested by analyzing the computer conferencing transcripts of the highest and lowest performing virtual design teams from an experiment [29] by means of a content coding classification scheme developed by Olson et al [32]
Summary
Organizations in today’s global economy face continual pressures to remain responsive to changes in the competitive marketplace. Ocker [30] [31] and Schmidt [44] suggest that the asynchronous computer – mediated - communication technology provided vital support to the virtual teams in terms of information exchange, recall and processing In another recent study on virtual teams [43] communication was stressed as an important part of team development and project execution. This paper presents results of a detailed content analysis of the computer-based communication transcripts for eight experimental virtual design teams: four high-performing virtual design teams are compared to four low-performing virtual design teams These teams accomplished either all or the vast majority of their work by communicating virtually using a web-based computer conferencing system. Do the leaders of the high and low performing team account for a greater difference in the number of communication messages and message lengths relative to the teams (the ratio of the leaders to the total team)?
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