Mini Track: Virtual Work, Teams, And Organizations

Abstract

The push and pull provided by information technology and rapidly changing business demands have led to virtual work becoming increasingly important in organizations. Virtual work can take various forms, from telecommuting to global project development teams. In virtual organizations and communities, individuals can be part of groups that have no physical co-location, and often do not meet, except virtually. Increased globalization, tightened traveling budgets, and heightened security awareness foster the growth of virtual environments. This mini-track focuses on issues related to challenges presented by and effectiveness of virtual work, teams, organizations, and communities. We sought papers addressing these issues from an organizational, managerial, team, community, or individual perspective, as well as papers on enabling technologies and their use in this environment. The resulting twelve papers published in the HICSS-38 proceedings investigate a variety of important topics of interest to researchers and practitioners. Walther, Bunz, and Bazarova address the development of trust in virtual groups. They propose communication rules based on social information processing theory, and empirically test them. Keim and Weitzel also explore trust development in establishing successful virtual partnerships. Factors influencing performance of virtual teams are of critical interest to researchers and practitioners. Staples and Cameron report results from a field study examining relationships between team performance and interpersonal skills, team size, and turnover. DeLone, Espinosa, Lee, and Carmel present a conceptual framework for global IS development project success. They conduct interviews with global project managers to validate the framework. Role coordination -preventing the emergence of individual roles and building shared team interaction mental models -is an important aspect of task performance in teams. Sutanto, Phang, Kuan, Kankanhalli, and Tan investigate this phenomenon in two global virtual teams and offer suggestions on how effective role coordination can be achieved. Galvin, McKinney, and Chudoba also investigate individuals’ integration with the team in pursuit of common objectives, proposing a model to help better understand the process of transformation from being individually centric to being team centric. Zhang, Fjermestad, and Tremain analyze and identify drawbacks and inconsistencies in previous empirical literature on leadership style in the virtual team context. They develop propositions for future research. Misiolek and Heckman examine leadership behavior in virtual teams by observing a virtual collaboration exercise and developing insights into how leadership behaviors emerge and are distributed. Addressing an increasingly important virtual team structure, Mark and Abrams investigate largescale group-to-group collaboration. They examine how interactions differ between collocated and distributed settings in a design team. Results indicate that subgroup interactions occurred differently within sites compared to across sites. DeLuca and Valacich examine communication media choice in virtual groups in two organizations. Results support Media Synchronicity Theory. Bhappu and Crews explore effects of communication media and conflict on team identification in diverse teams and suggest ways diverse teams can manage intra-group conflict. Chidambaram and Carte also examine virtual teams with diverse membership. They propose a model that describes how collaborative technologies can help leverage positive aspects of diversity and limit negative aspects; they then test the model in a longitudinal field study.