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.     

A global virtual team model to improve software development collaboration project

Information Systems and e-Business Management - Increasingly, universities across the globe are involved in collaborations at both national and international levels. In a nutshell, the...     

Human-systems interaction for virtual environment team training

Virtual environments are increasingly used to support collaborative activities and distance learning. However, few are designed to support students, instructors and simulations in multi-participant team training. This paper describes the Training Studio, a system for authoring, delivering and evaluating multi-participant team training in an immersed virtual environment. The Training Studio focuses on human-systems interaction, allowing multiple students to learn and perform team tasks. The Training Studio supports collaborative learning for either single or multi-participant activity. This is accomplished through the use of agents which are assigned to students to act as personal mentors or missing team members. Conducting team training within a virtual environment introduces complexities and issues unique to team training and multiple-participant virtual environments. This paper describes our approach to virtual environment team training, discussing issues confronted and resulting design considerations and implementations.     

Genetic learning of virtual team member preferences

Virtual team members do not have complete understanding of other team members’ preferences, which makes team coordination somewhat difficult and time consuming. Traditional approaches for team coordination require a lot of inter-agent electronic communication and often result in wasted effort. Methods that reduce inter-agent communication and conflicts are likely to increase productivity of virtual teams. In this research, we propose an evolutionary genetic algorithm (GA) based intelligent agent that learns a team member preferences from past actions, and develops a team-coordination schedule by minimizing schedule conflicts between different members serving on a virtual team. Using a discrete event simulation methodology, we test the proposed intelligent agent on different virtual teams of sizes two, four, six and eight members. The results of our experiments indicate that the GA-based intelligent agent learns individual team member preferences and generates a team-coordination schedule at a lower inter-agent communication cost.     

A large-scale complex virtual environment for team training

Virtual environments that allow multiple participants to cooperatively interact present complex design problems. In this article, we describe the Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT), a joint US Army-Loral project, which is the first fully distributed interactive simulation (DIS)-compliant training system development effort. This Army program's approach relies successfully on concurrent engineering, spiral development and usability engineering     

Perceived enablers of 3D virtual environments for virtual team learning and innovation

Virtual teams consist of geographically distributed employees working with a common goal using mostly technology for communication and collaboration. Virtual teams face a number of challenges, discussed in the literature in terms of communication through technology, difficulty in building trust, conveying social cues, and creating awareness, as well as cultural differences. These challenges impact collaboration, but also learning and innovation. This research focuses on how a social medium, the 3D virtual environment, is perceived to enable learning and innovation in virtual teams. We study this through a qualitative study based on interviews of distributed work managers’ perception of VEs. The major findings are that VEs are perceived to create collaborative learning atmospheres for virtual teams in terms of enabling engagement, a shared context awareness, and support in social network building. Another finding is that VEs are perceived to enable team learning, knowledge development, and collaboration through persistence of content, information sharing, learning through role-plays and simulations, and visualization. Furthermore, VEs enable the development of co-created content as well as new ways of working in virtual teams.     

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.     

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.     

Exploring virtual team-working effectiveness in the construction sector

In defining a virtual team-working solution as with any new organisational form, success relies not merely on the introduction and adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), but also on critically analysing the underlying social and organisational aspects. The paper investigates the effectiveness of virtual teams, and any other suitable form of virtual collaboration, in the Construction sector and explores the factors that influence their successful adoption. The positivist strand adopted in the research emphasises a particular approach that promotes software application hosting through a dedicated application service provider, as opposed to the traditional software-licensing model. The research identifies important socio-organisational challenges inherent to the project-based nature of Construction, including issues related to technology adoption, team identification, trust, and motivation. Action research techniques have been employed to conduct the research involving two Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) from France and Finland.     

Using virtual reality to study the effect of information redundancy on evacuation effectiveness

The International Organization for Standardization evacuation alarm (ISO 8201: 2017) is ineffective in initiating evacuation, particularly when people are engaged in pre-evacuation activities, and it is not easy to conduct experiments for evaluating evacuation behavior due to ethical and cost issues. A virtual building emergency where alarms went off while participants were performing activities was created to study the effect of redundancy on evacuation effectiveness. Three alarms were studied: (i) a regular nonverbal ISO alarm, (ii) a speech-inserted ISO alarm, and (iii) a technology-based ISO alarm concept (sound, visual, and haptic information). Evacuation behavior, perceived urgency, and delay time were measured. Results confirmed the effect of redundancy on measurements, and participants complied better with the speech-inserted and technology-based alarms, but there were no differences in evacuation effectiveness between them. Participants perceived higher urgency from the technology-based solution, which can be more adaptive in complicated environments where background noise and language/education barriers are problems. Otherwise, the speech-inserted alarm is more cost-effective.     

The sound of silence: The case of virtual team organising

In this paper we discuss the role of silence within a virtual organising context. The paper raises issues related to the construction of silence in the virtual team context and the implications it has on team interactions. By drawing upon existing studies on virtual teams, we argue that members' silence may not always have negative effects on team performance and team relationships, but that silence is an embedded part of this environment as it reinforces the very nature of virtuality. The theoretical and practical significance of this study are discussed and implications for further research are identified.     

The contingent effects of leadership on team collaboration in virtual teams

Decision-making in virtual teams creates challenges for leaders to structure team processes and provide task support. To help advance our knowledge of leadership in virtual teams, we explore the interaction effects between leadership styles and media richness on task cohesion and cooperative climate, which in turn influence team performance in decision-making tasks. Results from a laboratory study suggest that transactional leadership behaviors improve task cohesion of the team, whereas transformational leadership behaviors improve cooperative climate within the team which, in turn, improves task cohesion. However, these effects of leadership depend on media richness. Specifically, they occur only when media richness is low. Our results also suggest that task cohesion leads to group consensus and members’ satisfaction with the discussion, whereas cooperative climate improves discussion satisfaction and reduces time spent on the task.     

Mediating team effectiveness in the context of collaborative learning: The importance of team and task awareness

Learning teams in higher education executing a collaborative assignment are not always effective. To remedy this, there is a need to determine and understand the variables that influence team effectiveness. This study aimed at developing a conceptual framework, based on research in various contexts on team effectiveness and specifically team and task awareness. Core aspects of the framework were tested to establish its value for future experiments on influencing team effectiveness. Results confirmed the importance of shared mental models, and to some extent mutual performance monitoring for learning teams to become effective, but also of interpersonal trust as being conditional for building adequate shared mental models. Apart from the importance of team and task awareness for team effectiveness it showed that learning teams in higher education tend to be pragmatic by focusing primarily on task aspects of performance and not team aspects. Further steps have to be taken to validate this conceptual framework on team effectiveness.     

How to get mature global virtual teams: a framework to improve team process management in distributed software teams

Managing global software development teams is not an easy task because of the additional problems and complexities that have to be taken into account. This paper defines VTManager, a methodology that provides a set of efficient practices for global virtual team management in software development projects. These practices integrate software development techniques in global environments with others such as explicit practices for global virtual team management, definition of skills and abilities needed to work in these teams, availability of collaborative work environments and shared knowledge management practices. The results obtained and the lessons learned from implementing VTManager in a pilot project to develop software tools for collaborative work in rural environments are also presented. This project was carried out by geographically distributed teams involving people from seven countries with a high level of virtualness.     

The effects from technology-mediated interaction and openness in virtual team performance measures

As globalisation continues concurrent with mergers and acquisitions, transnational organisations are increasingly turning to the use of virtual teams in which members collaborate through technology-mediated interaction. Although collocated teams and virtual teams share many common characteristics including performance measures, the nature of the environments differ along several dimensions. In particular, members of virtual teams cooperate on global projects while resident in their home geographies and cultures and using various technologies to facilitate. From that context, this field study investigated virtual team performance using organisational culture as a framework.     

Effects of serious games on perceived team cohesiveness in a multi-user virtual environment

This study aims to explore the effects of a serious game on perceived team cohesiveness in a multi-user virtual environment. A one-shot case study/post-test only experiment design was used in this study. A questionnaire was administered to the participants, who played the serious game Zoom. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the proposed framework. The results indicated that the overall framework is statistically significant. The user interface elements of the game and the attitudes of the participants towards the game affected perceived team cohesiveness, whilst the personality factor “extraversion” was found to have a moderator effect on these relationships. The study is limited by the sample size, the self-reported survey and the fact that it had only one game play. The proposed framework of the study can be used by educators, researchers and managers working with groups to foster team cohesiveness in their organizations. This study differs from previous studies mainly by the application of a statistical model to observe the effects of multi-user virtual environment serious games on perceived team cohesiveness.     

Factors affecting the performance of knowledge collaboration in virtual team based on capital appreciation

Knowledge collaboration (KC) is an important strategy measure to improve knowledge management, focusing on not only efficiency of knowledge cooperation, but also adding value of intellectual capital and social capital. In virtual teams, many factors, such as team’s network characteristics, collaborative culture, and individual collaborative intention, affect the performance of KC. By discussing the nature of KC, this paper presents that the performance of can be measured from two aspects: effectiveness of collaboration and efficiency of cooperation. Among them, effectiveness of collaboration is measured through value added and efficiency of cooperation is measured through accuracy and timeliness. Then the paper discusses the factors affecting the performance of KC from network characteristics, individual attributes and team attributes. The results show that network characteristics, individual attributes and team attributes in virtual team have significant impacts on the performance of KC.     

Overcoming organizational challenges to secure knowledge management

Incident management systems have the potential to improve security dramatically but often experience problems stemming from organizational, interpersonal and social constraints that limit their effectiveness. These limits may cause underreporting of incidents, leading to erroneous perceptions of the actual safety and security situation of the organization. The true security situation may be better understood and underreporting may be reduced if underlying systemic issues surrounding security incident management are taken into account. A dynamic simulation, based on the parallel experience of industrial incident management systems, illustrates the cumulative effects of rewards, learning, and retributions on the fate of a hypothetical knowledge management system designed to collect information about events and incidents. Simulation studies are part of an ongoing research project to develop sustainable knowledge and knowledge transfer tools that support the development of a security culture.