Working Together Apart? Building a Knowledge‐Sharing Culture for Global Virtual Teams

A new impetus for greater knowledge‐sharing among team members needs to be emphasized due to the emergence of a significant new form of working known as ‘global virtual teams’. As information and communication technologies permeate every aspect of organizational life and impact the way teams communicate, work and structure relationships, global virtual teams require innovative communication and learning capabilities for different team members to effectively work together across cultural, organizational and geographical boundaries. Whereas information technology‐facilitated communication processes rely on technologically advanced systems to succeed, the ability to create a knowledge‐sharing culture within a global virtual team rests on the existence (and maintenance) of intra‐team respect, mutual trust, reciprocity and positive individual and group relationships. Thus, some of the inherent questions we address in our paper are: (1) what are the cross‐cultural challenges faced by global virtual teams?; (2) how do organizations develop a knowledge sharing culture to promote effective organizational learning among culturally‐diverse team members? and; (3) what are some of the practices that can help maximize the performance of global virtual teams? We conclude by examining ways that global virtual teams can be more effectively managed in order to reach their potential in this new interconnected world and put forward suggestions for further research.     

Toward the measure of virtual teams effectiveness

Virtual teams can be an alternative to colocated teams and they are inevitable when the members of team are significantly dispersed. Quite often when team members are dispersed there is a necessity to arrange either face‐to‐face (FTF) meetings or their substitute—videoconferencing sessions. Such cases take place in multinational corporations. In one of them from the automotive industry, we examined the cost‐effectiveness of arranging meetings of team members in the form of FTF or videoconferencing sessions. For this purpose, a mathematical model has been elaborated. This model can be a useful tool for choosing between creating a colocated or virtual team as well as about the form of meeting of virtual team members. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Overcoming impediments to virtual team effectiveness

The term virtual team denotes an organizational team whose members rarely meet face to face but who nevertheless perform interdependent tasks in pursuit of collective goals. This article identifies the unique aspects of virtual teams that generate major barriers to their effectiveness, and suggests ways in which these may be either overcome or mitigated. A process‐oriented model of virtual team effectiveness is presented, identifying issues associated with the development of transactive memory systems, work engagement, and collective efficacy as major challenges to virtual team effectiveness. These issues are illustrated with reference to the experience of virtual teams within a minerals processing firm. Finally, the authors discuss aspects of virtual team leadership and team climate that may help overcome some of the potential process losses associated with virtual teamwork. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The use of prototypes to bridge knowledge boundaries in agile software development

Bridging knowledge boundaries among project team members is essential to prevent delays or complete failure of software development projects. Prior researchers have reported that software prototypes can be used to help bridge knowledge boundaries between team members in traditional software development settings, yet their use in an agile development setting remains unexplored. Agile development centers the interactions between team members on emerging representations of the prototype whose properties are prone to change over time. Therefore, we conducted an in‐depth study of an agile development project to enhance our understanding on how software prototypes are used as boundary objects in a distributed team setting. Our analyses of team member interactions during 46 virtual meetings that took place over a period of 6 months revealed four different prototype use practices (exemplifying, contrasting, relating, framing) that were effective in bridging syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic knowledge boundaries. We also provide empirically grounded evidence of how variations in object properties can afford different use practices, how the use practices take advantage of these properties, and how object properties are reshaped through these use practices as different types of knowledge boundaries are bridged. These findings bear important implications for research on prototypes as boundary objects in software development in particular and boundary object use in general.     

Contextualising collective efficacy in virtual team research: The essential role of collaborative technologies in the virtual team efficacy conceptual framework

One factor receiving contemporary interest from virtual team researchers is collective-level efficacy, that is, a team's shared belief in its collective abilities to work effectively. However, our understanding of this literature leads to two concerns. First, depending on traditional team-focused collective-level efficacy concepts conveys an indifferent view of technology that ignores decades of research explaining how virtual teams' reliance on collaborative technologies differentiates them from traditional teams. Second, the information systems literature has largely ignored the concept of collective-level efficacy in virtual team research. That collective-level efficacy is underexamined in IS research is disappointing, given the growing recognition (outside the IS literature) that it is crucial to virtual team success. This absence becomes even more concerning given that IS researchers developed the concept of virtual team efficacy (VTE) specifically for virtual team settings. Unlike collective-level efficacy measures designed for traditional team settings, VTE incorporates technology into its conceptual definition and the operationalization of its measurement indicators. Thus, it is a stronger predictor of virtual team outcomes. To demonstrate its importance to IS research, we used a deductive theory-driven approach to propose and empirically evaluate whether VTE indirectly acts on virtual team effectiveness through the critical concepts of trust and participants' perceptions of problems associated with the collaboration inhibitors of time difference, geographical separation, and cultural differences. This research contributes significantly to the literature by confirming VTE's relationship to important virtual team success factors and informing IS researchers about the appropriate choice of constructs when studying collective-level efficacy in virtual team settings.     

Exploring knowledge contribution from an OCB perspective

As participation in virtual community becomes popular, it is important to know how to encourage individuals to contribute actively and assist other members share their expertise. Through the lens of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), we explored the factors that facilitate voluntary knowledge sharing in a virtual community. We examined OCB in online gaming communities in which various behaviors can contribute to the community (the team) or to individuals (team members). Our aim was to gain insight into ways of creating an environment that facilitated voluntary sharing of knowledge. Our findings suggested that effective leader–member exchange relationships, the attractiveness of the group to individuals, and affection similarity were important in establishing a virtual environment within which voluntary contributions could be promoted effectively. In addition, our study suggested that better quality leader–member exchange relationships and positive affection toward the virtual team enhanced OCB.     

Knowledge transfer in virtual settings: the role of individual virtual competency

Economic forces, competitive pressures and technological advances have created an environment within which firms have developed new ways of organizing (e.g. virtual work settings) and managing their resources (e.g. knowledge management) in order to maintain and improve firm performance. Extant research has highlighted the challenges associated with managing knowledge in virtual settings. However, researchers are still struggling to provide effective guidance to practitioners in this field. We believe that a better understanding of individual virtual competency is a potential avenue for managing the complexity of knowledge transfer in virtual settings. In particular, we suggest that optimal knowledge transfers can be achieved by individuals armed with the right personal capabilities and skills for virtual work, particularly when those knowledge transfers are emergent, bottom-up and cannot be specified a priori. The virtual competency exhibited by individuals can be the key to overcoming the constraints of knowledge transfers with such characteristics because underlying competency can facilitate effective action in unfamiliar and novel situations. In this conceptual research, we develop a theoretical model of individual virtual competence and describe its role in the communication process, which underpins effective knowledge transfer in virtual settings. Additionally, we consider the antecedent role that prior experience in virtual activity plays in aiding workers to develop virtual competence, which in turn engenders effective knowledge transfer. We conclude with implications for future research and for practicing managers.     

A Comprehensive Review of Redirected Walking Techniques: Taxonomy,Methods, and Future Directions

Virtual reality (VR) allows users to explore and experience a computer-simulated virtual environment so that VR users can be immersed in a totally artificial virtual world and interact with arbitrary virtual objects. However, the limited physical tracking space usually restricts the exploration of large virtual spaces, and VR users have to use special locomotion techniques to move from one location to another. Among these techniques, redirected walking (RDW) is one of the most natural locomotion techniques to solve the problem based on near-natural walking experiences. The core idea of the RDW technique is to imperceptibly guide users on virtual paths, which might vary from the paths they physically walk in the real world. In a similar way, some RDW algorithms imperceptibly change the structure and layout of the virtual environment such that the virtual environment fits into the tracking space. In this survey, we first present a taxonomy of existing RDW work. Based on this taxonomy, we compare and analyze both contributions and shortcomings of the existing methods in detail, and find view manipulation methods offer satisfactory visual effect but the experience can be interrupted when users reach the physical boundaries, while virtual environment manipulation methods can provide users with consistent movement but have limited application scenarios. Finally, we discuss possible future research directions, indicating combining artificial intelligence with this area will be effective and intriguing.     

Creativity in virtual teams: Systematic review,synthesis and research agenda

Virtual teams are gaining increasing momentum in contemporary organizations. Although it is becoming clear that virtual teams will play a major role in shaping the future of work, we still know relatively little about their creative performance. Because of the disproportionate focus on conventional, face-to-face working practices, much of the literature remains centred around co-located teams. In this review, we integrate existing research on team creativity and virtual work to identify the relevant factors, processes and contextual conditions that have been shown to influence creativity in virtual teams. We highlight the major challenges that are likely to impede team creativity and assess their relevance to contemporary virtual work practices. We conclude by presenting promising avenues for future research in this area.     

A Survey on 3D Virtual Object Manipulation: From the Desktop to Immersive Virtual Environments

Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this end, researchers have endeavoured to find efficient solutions using either traditional input devices or focusing on different input modalities, such as touch and mid‐air gestures. Different virtual environments and diverse input modalities present specific issues to control object position, orientation and scaling: traditional mouse input, for example, presents non‐trivial challenges because of the need to map between 2D input and 3D actions. While interactive surfaces enable more natural approaches, they still require smart mappings. Mid‐air gestures can be exploited to offer natural manipulations mimicking interactions with physical objects. However, these approaches often lack precision and control. All these issues and many others have been addressed in a large body of work. In this article, we survey the state‐of‐the‐art in 3D object manipulation, ranging from traditional desktop approaches to touch and mid‐air interfaces, to interact in diverse virtual environments. We propose a new taxonomy to better classify manipulation properties. Using our taxonomy, we discuss the techniques presented in the surveyed literature, highlighting trends, guidelines and open challenges, that can be useful both to future research and to developers of 3D user interfaces.     

Conceptualizing the Awareness of Collaboration: A Qualitative Study of a Global Virtual Team

Innovative organizations are increasing their use of distributed teamwork, but there are several difficulties in reaching shared understanding between the team members in these settings. A lack of awareness of other team members’ working processes is one of the drawbacks that a virtual team may face while attempting to collaborate on a shared task. In this study virtual teamwork was supported with a specific working model. The aim was to investigate virtual team members’ awareness of collaboration. One global team (N=19) within a single organization worked as a distributed team in a shared web-based workspace for three months. The data were gathered by means of questionnaires, log-files of the shared virtual workspace and collected company documents in order to find out how team members perceive their collaboration. Based on qualitative data analysis, three different aspects of collaboration awareness were identified: an awareness of the possibility for collaboration, an awareness of the aims of collaboration, and an awareness of the process of collaboration. The results presented in this paper give guidelines for discussing what the awareness of collaboration means in the context of distributed collaboration.     

An interactional view of social presence: Making the virtual other “real”

In IS research, social presence is generally defined as the perceived capacity of a communication medium to convey contextual cues normally available in face‐to‐face settings. However, theorizing social presence as a property of the technology has been challenged for decades. The objective of this paper is to develop a more contemporary, interactional view of social presence. To this end, this paper develops a new conceptualization of how participants form the sense that each other is present. We characterize the development of this sense as a skilful accomplishment that entails interactants' joint construction of each other as “real.” Viewing social presence as contingent on social practice, we seek to answer the following research question: “How is social presence accomplished in virtual environments?” To explicate how virtual others are perceived as becoming socially present, that is, emotionally and psychologically “real” to someone interacting with them, we draw from Goffman's work, particularly his concepts of involvement and involvement obligation. Detailing two examples of social interaction in the virtual world Second Life, our analysis highlights the key role that this moral obligation, intrinsic to everyday social interaction, plays in virtual others becoming perceived as psychoemotionally “there.” By outlining a model of how the sense of a virtual other as “real” is produced in and through social interaction, our work contributes a sociological perspective to the construct of social presence and underscores some of the material and social conditions necessary for users to perceive virtual others as present.     

Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision-making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision-making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e-mail, teleconferencing combined with e-Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media.     

Surviving the paradoxes of virtual teamwork

Despite the potential benefits of virtual teams, current literature suggests that virtual teamwork is rife with complex challenges. We frame some of these challenges as paradoxes inherent in the concept of virtual teamwork. Based on interviews with 42 leaders and members of virtual teams, we identify five paradoxes: (1) virtual teams require physical presence; (2) flexibility of virtual teamwork is aided by structure; (3) interdependent work in virtual teams is accomplished by members' independent contributions; (4) task-oriented virtual teamwork succeeds through social interactions; and (5) mistrust is instrumental to establishing trust among virtual team members. In addition, we identify strategies that respondents used to cope with, or 'survive' the paradoxes of virtual teamwork.     

Group development in virtual teams: An experimental reexamination

Virtual teams are thought to be experienced differently and to have poor outcomes because there is little or no face-to-face interaction and a tendency for virtual team members to use different communication techniques for forming relationships. However, the expanding use of virtual teams in organizations suggests that virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome these barriers and be experienced in much the same way as face-to-face teams. This paper reports the result of an experiment in which virtual teams participated in an exercise where they completed an information-sharing task ten times as a team. The results suggest that, contrary to one-shot, ad hoc virtual teams, longer-lived virtual teams follow a sequential group development process. Virtual team development appears to differ from face-to-face teams because the use of computer-mediated communication heightens pressure to conform when a virtual team is first formed, meaning trust is most strongly linked with feeling that the team was accomplishing the task appropriately. As the virtual teams developed, trust in peers was more strongly linked with goal commitment. Once the teams were working together effectively, accomplishing the task appropriately was the strongest link with trust in peers. I suggest that virtual team managers should cultivate virtual workspaces that are similar to those proven to work in face-to-face contexts: (1) teams should have clear, specific goals, (2) members should be encouraged or even required to communicate with each other, and (3) team members should feel that they might work with the other team members again.     

真实感虚拟人脸的实现和应用

实现了一个交互式人脸建膜和动画的工具，用户可以很容易从一个人的正面和侧面的照片构造出头部的三维模型，并在这个模型上实现特定人脸的表情和动画，同时可以进行口型和声音的同步。基于以上技术，实现了一个虚拟人脸的动画组件，可以应用于WINDOWS应用系统中，给用户提供更加新颖和友好的局面。     

Stop talking and type: comparing virtual and face‐to‐face mentoring in an epistemic game

Research has shown that computer games and other virtual environments can support significant learning gains because they allow young people to explore complex concepts in simulated form. However, in complex problem‐solving domains, complex thinking is learned not only by taking action, but also with the aid of mentors who provide guidance in the form of questions, instructions, advice, feedback and encouragement. In this study, we examine one context of such mentoring to understand the impact of replacing face‐to‐face interactions between mentors and students with virtual, chat‐based interactions. We use pre‐ and post‐measures of learning and a post‐measure of engagement, as well as epistemic network analysis (ENA), a novel quantitative method, to examine student and mentor discourse. Our results suggest that mentoring via online chat can be as effective as mentoring face‐to‐face in appropriately structured contexts more generally – and that ENA may be a useful tool for assessing student and mentor discourse in the context of learning interactions.     

Training to improve virtual team communication

Abstract. Organizations are utilizing virtual teams, comprising workgroup members who communicate and collaborate with technology, to accomplish tasks. These teams are geographically distributed and communicate via computer-mediated communication systems (CMCS), and may never or rarely meet face-to-face. Relational links among team members have been found to be a significant contributor to the effectiveness of information exchange in the use of CMCS. In most cases, team members receive little or no training to improve the effectiveness of this form of communication. When training is used, it often focuses on software utilization skills, not on interpersonal communication dynamics. This paper discusses the effect of virtual team communication training on group interactions, especially for enhancing these relational links and thereby improving communication and information exchange in virtual teams. It was found that teams that were given appropriate training exhibited improved perceptions of the interaction process over time, specifically with regard to trust, commitment and frank expression between members. Discussion of the role of training on virtual team processes and outcomes is discussed and future research implications are presented.     

Virtual environments for work, study and leisure

Virtual environments have the potential of adding a new dimension to the concept of a community. In this paper, we describe our work on a text-based virtual environment. Although our focus is on work applications, the environment is equally suited for educational and recreational uses. The paper is presented in the context of the needs of a software development team but can be applied to other work teams as well. Two essential characteristics of successful work teams are good communication and efficient access to project information. Maintaining both of these becomes more and more difficult as the size of the team grows, and gets very difficult when the team is geographically dispersed. We describe a project that could be used to test the hypothesis that a collaborative environment using text-based virtual reality would alleviate these problems by relieving physical separation through virtual proximity. In the first phase of the project, we adapted and extended Jersey, a Smalltalk-based MOO (Multi-user domain Object Oriented) with collaborative virtual environment (CVE) features. On the basis of our experience, we then started designing and implementing MUM, a Multi-Universe MOO. When completed, the more extendable and customisable MUM will provide novel features and encourage developer experimentation. We describe some of MUM's features and our plans for it.