Virtual team

A virtual team (also known as a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, or remote team[1]) is a group of individuals who work across time, space and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology.[2] Powell, Piccoli and Ives define virtual teams in their literature review article "as groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks."[3] Ale Ebrahim, N., Ahmed, S. & Taha, Z. in a 2009 literature review paper, added two key issues to definition of a virtual team "as small temporary groups of geographically, organizationally and/ or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work predominantly with electronic information and communication technologies in order to accomplish one or more organization tasks".[4] Members of virtual teams communicate electronically and may never meet face-to-face. Virtual teams are made possible by a proliferation of fiber optic technology that has significantly increased the scope of off-site communication.[5] Virtual teams allow companies to procure the best talent without geographical restrictions.[5] According to Hambley, O'Neil, & Kline (2007), "virtual teams require new ways of working across boundaries through systems, processes, technology, and people, which requires effective leadership... despite the widespread increase in virtual teamwork, there has been relatively little focus on the role of virtual team leaders."[6]

Model

There are three main aspects to a virtual team - purpose, people and links.[7] While purpose is an important aspect for all organizations, it's the most critical aspect for virtual teams; purpose is what holds a virtual team together. Virtual teams do not have hierarchy or any other common structures because they may not be from the same organization, and purpose here brings and holds the team together.[7] Purpose is generally translated into certain action steps for people to work on with a defined structure consisting of common goals, individual tasks and results.[7] A number of factors may impact the performance of members of a virtual team. For example, team members with a higher degree of focused attention and aggregate lower levels of temporal dissociation (or flow ) may have higher performance. Further, members with higher degrees of attention focus may prefer asynchronous communication channels, while those with low levels of flow may prefer synchronous communication channels.[8]

Structure

Powell, Piccoli and Ives[9] found and investigated 43 articles about virtual teams and concluded that the current research have found four main focus areas of it.

Inputs

Design of a virtual team means simply that forming a VT should be planned. This means structuring the interactions; what kind of communication tools are used, how much face-to-face time will be possible, etc. Research has found that team building exercises,[10] the establishment of shared norms (Sarker et al., 2001, p. 50) and the establishment of a clear team structure[11] helps the team to succeed.[12] Kirkman et al.[13] found empirically that having more face-to-face meetings improved the empowerment of virtual teams, which leads to better learning. Numerous communication problems can be diverted by creating shared knowledge databases in order to allow all the team members to have the same information and to know that others have it, too.[14] As an added bonus, shared knowledge databases also share the same language and mental models, which are substitutes for the all important face-to-face time. Furthermore, shared mental models can be focused through designing, requiring the teams to create goals and strategies. This has been shown clearly to improve the teams[15]

With cultural differences also coordination problems and obstacles to effective communication can be involved.[16] These problems may be solved by actively understanding and accepting differences in cultures.[17]

The technical expertise of a team seems to have a positive effect on the team's performance and the satisfaction of belonging to the team.[18] At the same time, high trust is found to develop.[19] On the other hand, "the relationship between technology and task performance is found to be more dependent on experience with technology and with group membership than the type of task on which the group was working".[20]

Diverse technological skills can create conflict among the team.[21] This is why teams should have consistent training to improve team performance.[22] For instance, mentoring is a good way to make personal ties to more experienced virtual team professionals.[23] According to Tan et al.,[24] consistent training fosters cohesiveness, trust, teamwork, commitment to team goals, individual satisfaction and higher perceived decision quality. In their article, they taught a communication technique called the dialogue technique. It is created through three stages: small talk, sharing mental models and norm building.

The overall results found that more virtual teams exhibit higher task conflict and lower communication frequency, knowledge sharing, performance, and satisfaction. Although these findings are consistent with previous research, their results suggest that the results do not generalize to all types of teams and methodological approaches.[25]

Virtualness has a different effect on teams depending on the length of team duration. For short-term teams, leaner media, misattributions, and subgroups all potentially contribute to less effective teams. In longer-term teams, members make fewer misattributions to a person as they interact with each other over a longer time frame and develop relationships. Also, over longer time spans teammates build a group identity that helps them to overcome differences. There aren't any negative effects on team performance or satisfaction, and team conflict actually decreased as the degree of virtualness increased. Although there was a negative effect on communication frequency and knowledge sharing, the effect was much less in long-term teams compared to short-term teams.[25]

Virtualness also has varying influence on teams depending on how the virtualness is measured as well as the length of time that a team is working together. The negative effects that effect short-term teams disappeared for longer term teams. Their results also showed that there are different effects on virtualness depending on what type of analysis is used (individual or group) and the methods (experiments or surveys) of virtual work.[25]

Socio-emotional processes

This section introduces the emotional problems involved and mitigation tactics needed to achieve cohesion and trust among team members. Overall, the research about this reports "a positive link between socio-emotional process and outcomes of the virtual team project."[26] Because of geographical distribution, face-to-face time occurs only rarely. This, according to research, results in weaker social links between team-mates and leads the team to be more task-focused than socially focused.[27] If face-to-face meetings are feasible, meetings should be held as much as possible at the beginning of the team formation in order to bring team-mates closer and form interpersonal bonds. These meetings should focus more on relationship building than on actual business.[28] However, with socializing different cultural preferences have to be remembered.[29] If face-to-face meetings are not possible or feasible to the desired extent, other approaches can be applied. Social-bonding can be done partially via electronic communication tools. Jarvenpaa and Leidner's[30] study found that if teams communicate more socially they achieve higher trust and better social and emotional relationships. Leaders can help foster relationship building and general team building in many ways, e.g. by providing continuous feedback, listening to team members‟ opinions and suggestions, clearly stating the team member roles and having consistency in their leadership style.[31]

Cohesion means the sense of unity in a team. Cohesion is important to virtual teams, and is associated with better performance[32] and greater satisfaction.[33] Cohesion, and trust are very important in fostering team effectiveness. It has been found that collaborative technologies take away from the development of cohesion within Virtual Teams and that traditional teams have higher level of team cohesiveness.[34] Another study has found that although virtual teams may start with low cohesion, over time they exchange enough social information to develop strong cohesion.[35] In comparing men and women’s perception of cohesion in virtual teams, Lind (1999) found that both women in virtual teams and men in traditional teams perceived greater team cohesiveness than men in virtual teams. However, virtual teams have difficulty attaining cohesion.[36] Research on socio-emotional development in virtual teams has centered on relationship building, specifically team cohesion and trust. Relationship building deals with interactions that increase inclusiveness. Socio-emotional processes and outcomes of virtual team projects are closely related, as virtual teams need to meet the socio-emotional needs of virtual team members in order to be successful.[37]

Trust is particularly problematic subject with virtual teams, because it is arguable whether people can be expected to trust each other if they have never met face–to-face.[38] Furthermore, trust is noted to be crucial in successful teams, but usually there is not much time to build it little by little because often the teams are short-lived in projects. Jarvenpaa and Leidner[39] describe a mechanism of how people solve the trust problem in a short time. It is called the swift trust paradigm and it suggests that team members assume from the beginning that the other team members are trustworthy. They adjust that assumption during the lifetime of the team. Jarvenpaa and Leidner[39] also researched the differences between teams that had a high level of trust in the beginning and teams with a high amount of trust in the end and compared them. To achieve high trust early in the group's life, the team had social and enthusiastic communication and they coped well with technical uncertainty and took individual initiatives. The groups that enjoyed trust later had predictable communication, timely responses, positive leadership and the ability to move from social communication to task-focused communication.[30] The integrity of other team members is important in the development of trust, and perceptions of other members’ benevolence supports the maintenance of trust over time.[40] Face-to-face meetings during the beginning stages for a team, before they become virtual, helps to develops strong trust.

Task processes

Task processes are actions that team members carry out in order to accomplish their goal and complete their project. The three main parts to task processes are communication, coordination and task-technology-structure fit.

Communication is one of the most crucial things in virtual teams. Communication is vital to the success of the virtual team and it is crucial that the team is a group of excellent communicators with the proper technology for the best levels of communication.[41] It starts from selecting excellent communicators for the team members and the right technology for them to use.[42] Virtual communication technologies cause many difficulties in effective team communication, such as time delays, common reference frames, differences of interpretation, and assurance of participation for remote team members.[43] Some empirically found challenges in successful communication in virtual teams are failure to communicate due to wrong or lacking contextual information, unevenly distributed information, interpretation of the meaning of silence and technical problems.[44] Nonverbal communication, which is vital for team communication, is also missing in virtual teams.[45] Traditional teams communicate more effectively than virtual teams.[46] Difficulties often arise when some team members are co-located while others are geographically distant. There is an assumption that co-located team members communicate with each other about information that is not communicated to the distant member, which can cause friction between members.[47] Leadership and cultural differences also have a large impact on the effectiveness of communication.[48] The frequency and predictability of communication and how much feedback is provided regularly improves the effectiveness of communication, which leads to greater team trust and improves team performance.[49] On the other hand, inconsistent and infrequent communication reduces the coordination and success of virtual teams.[50] One common reason is that some team members leave for a short amount of time without communicating their absence to other members.[51] However, virtual teams are found to communicate more frequently than normal teams[52] and female-only virtual teams have higher communication than male-only or combined gender virtual teams.[53] Higher effective communication is shown to improve cultural understanding.[54]

Inequalities of hierarchy within the group are reduced via email communication and also make it easier to access higher level employees due to the difficulty of scheduling face to face meetings. However, minority members are more likely to express their opinions in anonymous conditions, though their opinions are more accepted in face-to-face conditions.[55] Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) groups create hierarchies that try to preserve the status quota.[56] In-group and out-group biases were found in student groups by Cramton (2001). Lateral communication in virtual teams can be important to a team’s ability to adapt and change, especially when moving from co-location to Virtual Teams.[57] Lateral communication can be improved by creating a flatter reporting structure and hierarchy as well as by using computer mediated communication tools.[58]

The extensive reliance on communication technology leads to reduced impact and difficulties in management compared to the traditional teams.[59] Researchers have found some solutions for these problems. One company has created a reward system for team cooperation to encourage people to actively and accurately communicate.[60] On the other hand, according to Pink's[61] research on rewarding creativity, rewarding communication is not a sustainable way to encourage cooperation. In another company, they emphasized the need to debate as well as merely share information.[62] Predictability and feedback also frequently improve communication effectiveness, creating trust and better team performance.[42] In addition, in one study researchers tested the question of whether adding video to electronic communication helps to explain a detailed task (a map route) to another person.[63] They found that for native speaker pairs it did not bring any additional benefits, but for non-native speaker pairs it brought significant improvement to the task.[64]

Coordination is how much combined effort exists between various parts of an organization and how consistent and coherent they are.[65] Coordination is positively associated with virtual team performance.[66] However, it is difficult for virtual teams to coordinate across time zones, cultural divides and divergent mental models.[67] The development of a type of collaboration norms within the team are necessary for a team to meld team members’ contributions.[68] Face-to-face meetings are especially helping in leading a successful project.[69] If face-to-face meetings are not possible, a formal protocol for communication training improves both coordination and collaboration activities.[70] Minimizing cultural barriers also improves coordination between team members.[71] It is, naturally, more difficult to coordinate virtual teams in different time zones, cultures and mental models. Collaboration norms have to develop for the team to function well.[72] As mentioned before, periodical face-to-face meetings are a good way to form relationships and also a good vehicle to coordinate activities and to drive the project forward.[73] When face-to-face meetings are not feasible, one alternative is to develop coordination protocols with communication training.[74] Ramesh and Dennis[75] have suggested standardizing the team‟s inputs, processes and/or outputs. This should help the team to coordinate and help the other party.

The task-technology-structure fit examines "the possible fit between various technologies available...";[72] Studies have hypothesized that the technology fit depends on individual preferences, e.g. experience of use and the urgency of the task;[28][73] The technology used is dependent on personal preference, previous experience with the technology, ease of use, need for documenting project activities, and how urgent the task is.[76][77][78] found that face-to-face meetings or phone calls are suitable for ambiguous tasks, managing conflicts, managing external resources, brainstorming and strategic talks. Electronic communication is more suitable for more structured tasks such as routine analysis, examining design tradeoffs and monitoring project status. Interestingly, in their study the team first adjusted their organization to the technology at hand, but later also adjusted the technology to their organization.

Outputs

Output in virtual teams means all the things that come out of the work processes of the team.

"Decision quality" is one of the outputs of virtual teams. The majority of research has not found significant evidence of difference between the decision quality of virtual and traditional teams and the number of ideas that were generated.[79] However Chidambaram & Bostrom (1993) found that virtual teams generate more ideas compared to traditional teams. As there are many constraints with working virtually, virtual teams require a longer time to reach a decision[80]

When comparing "the performance" of traditional and virtual teams, the results are mixed. Some studies find traditional teams and some virtual teams to be better. The majority of studies have found the teams to be about at the same level.[81] Powell, Piccoli and Ives[82] list many studies that have found different factors, which make virtual teams successful. The found factors are:

The results from different student studies are mixed concerning working in a virtual team.[82] Tan et al.[83] found that teams which used their dialogue technique were more satisfied with decisions made in the team. One study found that a traditional team started out more satisfied than a virtual team. Then, in less than a year, the satisfaction of the virtual team rose and exceeded the satisfaction of the traditional team.[84] Women are more satisfied than men with virtual teams[85] and are also more satisfied compared to women in traditional teams. Team members that are more satisfied were more likely to have had training[86] and used more communication methods[87] compared to unsatisfied team members.

Types

Below are the most common types of virtual teams.[6]

  1. Networked teams
  2. Parallel teams
  3. Project development teams
  4. Work, production or functional teams
  5. Service teams
  6. Offshore ISD teams

Networked teams

Generally, networked teams[88] are geographically distributed and not necessarily from the same organization. These teams are frequently created and just as frequently dissolved; they are usually formed to discuss specific topics where members from the area of expertise, possibly from different organizations, pitch their ideas in the same discussion. Depending on the complexity of the issue, additional members to the team may be added at any time. The duration these teams last may vary significantly depending on how fast or slow the issue is resolved.[6]

Parallel teams

Parallel teams are highly task oriented teams that usually consist of specialized professionals. While they are generally only required for very short span of time, unlike networked teams, they are not dissolved after completion of the tasks. The team may be either internal or external to the organization.[6]

Project development teams

Similar to parallel teams, these teams are geographically distributed and may operate from different timezones. Project development teams are mainly focused on creating new products, information systems or organizational processes for users and/or customers. These teams exist longer than parallel teams and have the added ability to make decisions rather than just make recommendations. Similar to networked teams, project development teams may also add or remove members of their team at any given time, as needed for their area of expertise.[6]

Work, production or functional teams

These teams are totally function specific where they only work on a particular area within an organization (i.e. finance, training, research, etc.). Operating virtually from different geographical locations, these teams exist to perform regular or ongoing tasks.[6]

Service teams

Service teams are geographically located in different time-zones and are assigned to a particular service such as customer support, network upgrades, data maintenance, etc. Each team works on providing the particular service in their daylight hours and at the end of day, work is delegated to the next team which operates in a different timezone so that there is someone handling the service 24 hours a day.[6]

Offshore ISD teams

Offshore ISD outsourcing teams are independent service provider teams that a company can subcontract portions of work to. These teams usually work in conjunction with an onshore team.[5] Offshore ISD is commonly used for software development as well as international R&D projects.[5]

Management

According to[89] The life circle of virtual team management includes five stages:

  1. Preparations
  2. Launch
  3. Performance management
  4. Team development
  5. Disbanding

Preparations

The initial task during the implementation of a team is the definition of the general purpose of the team together with the determination of the level of virtuality that might be appropriate to achieve these goals. These decisions are usually determined by strategic factors such as mergers, increase of the market span, cost reductions, flexibility and reactivity to the market, etc. Management-related activities that should take place during preparation phase includes mission statement, personnel selection, task design, rewards system design, choose appropriate technology and organizational integration.[89]

Launch

It is highly recommended that, in the beginning of virtual teamwork, all members should meet each other face-to-face. Crucial elements of such a “kick-off” workshop are getting acquainted with the other team members, clarifying the team goals, clarifying the roles and functions of the team members, information and training how communication technologies can be used efficiently, and developing general rules for the teamwork. As a consequence, “kick-off” workshops are expected to promote clarification of team processes, trust building, building of a shared interpretative context, and high identification with the team.

Getting acquainted, goal clarification and development of intra-team rules should also be accomplished during this phase. Initial field data that compare virtual teams with and without such “kick-off” meetings confirm a general positive effects on team effectiveness, although more differentiated research is necessary. Experimental studies demonstrate that getting acquainted before the start of computer-mediated work facilitates cooperation and trust.[89]

Performance management

After the launch of a virtual team, work effectiveness and a constructive team climate has to be maintained using performance management strategies. The following discussion is again restricted to issues on which empirical results are already available. These issues are leadership, communication within virtual teams, team members' motivation, and knowledge management.[89]

Leadership is a central challenge in virtual teams. Particularly, all kinds of direct control are difficult when team managers are not at the same location as the team members. As a consequence, delegative management principles are considered that shift parts of classic managerial functions to the team members. However, team members only accept and fulfill such managerial functions when they are motivated and identify with the team and its goals, which is again more difficult to achieve in virtual teams. Next, empirical results on three leadership approaches are summarized that differ in the degree of autonomy of the team members: Electronic monitoring as an attempt to realize directive leadership over distance, management by objectives (MBO) as an example for delegative leadership principles, and self-managing teams as an example for rather autonomous teamwork.[89]

Communication processes are perhaps the most frequently investigated variables relevant for the regulation of virtual teamwork. By definition, communication in virtual teams is predominantly based on electronic media such as e-mail, telephone, video-conference, etc. The main concern here is that electronic media reduce the richness of information exchange compared to face-to-face communication. Predominant research issues have been conflict escalation and disinhibited communication (“flaming”), the fit between communication media and communication contents, and the role of non-job-related communication.[89]

For the management of motivational and emotional processes, three groups of such processes have been addressed in empirical investigations so far: motivation and trust, team identification and cohesion, and satisfaction of the team members. Since most of the variables are originated within the person, they can vary considerably among the members of a team, requiring appropriate aggregation procedures for multilevel analyses (e.g. motivation may be mediated by interpersonal trust[90]).[89]

Systematic research is needed on the management of knowledge and the development of shared understanding within the teams, particularly since theoretical analyses sometimes lead to conflicting expectations. The development of such “common ground” might be particularly difficult in virtual teams because sharing of information and the development of a “transactive memory” (i.e., who knows what in the team) is harder due to the reduced amount of face-to-face communication and the reduced information about individual work contexts.[89]

Team development

Virtual teams can be supported by personnel and team development interventions. The development of such training concepts should be based on an empirical assessment of the needs and/or deficits of the team and its members, and the effectiveness of the trainings should be evaluated empirically.[91] The steps of team developments include assessment of needs/deficits, individual and team training, and evaluation of training effects.[89]

Disbanding and re-integration

Finally, the disbanding of virtual teams and the re-integration of the team members is an important issue that has been neglected not only in empirical but also in most of the conceptual work on virtual teams. However, particularly when virtual project teams have only a short life-time and reform again quickly, careful and constructive disbanding is mandatory in order to maintain high motivation and satisfaction among the employees. Members of transient project teams anticipate the end of the teamwork in the foreseeable future, which in turn overshadows the interaction and shared outcomes. The final stage of group development should be a gradual emotional disengagement that includes both sadness about separation and (at least in successful groups) joy and pride in the achievements of the team.[89]

Advantages

Cultural diversity has been shown to have an impact on group decision-making, and some of it can be positive for the team.[92] Combined with collaborative conflict management, groups of individuals from different cultural perspectives are more likely to actively participate in group decision making.[93] The differing backgrounds and experiences of these group members also encourage creativity and create conflicting viewpoints, which make it more likely that multiple options are explored and considered. The other side of this same coin is that virtual teams create a more equal workplace, discouraging age, race, and disability discrimination by forcing individuals to interact with others whose differences challenge their assumptions. Physically disadvantaged employees are also able to participate more in teams where communication is virtual, where they may not have previously been able to due to physical limitations of an office or other workspace.[94]

Virtual teams are required to use technologies to communicate that have the side effect of mitigating some negative impacts of cultural diversity.[92] For instance, email as a medium of communication does not transfer accents and carries fewer noticeable verbal language differences than voice communication. Cultural barriers are not removed from the team, they are instead shielded from view in situations where they are irrelevant. In fact, simply understanding the diversity within a team and working on ways around that can strengthen the relationship between team members of different cultures.[95]

Virtual teams save travel time and cost, significant expenses for businesses with multiple locations or having clients located in multiple places. They also reduce disruption in the normal workday by not requiring an individual to physically leave their workspace.[94] This improved efficiency can also directly translate to saved costs for a company.

A company is able to recruit from a larger pool of employees if using virtual teams, as people are increasingly unwilling to relocate for new jobs. A growing amount of talent would otherwise be unobtainable without the employee traveling often. The use of virtual teams also allows the employee to participate in multiple projects within the company that are located on different sites.[94] This in turn helps the company by allowing them to reuse existing resources so that they are not required to hire a new employee to do the same job.

Disadvantages

It is common that cultural differences will come up in global teams. Cultural diversity also has negative impact on communication, often due to language barriers and cultural mismatches in the workplace.[92]

Satisfaction among the team members of a virtual team has been shown to be less positive than satisfaction among face-to-face teams. This drop in satisfaction is in part because it is more difficult to build trust without face-to-face communications,[96] a necessary part of high-performing virtual teams.[97] However, effective management and adherence to proper goal setting principles specific to the nature of work virtual teams require can lead to improved team effectiveness.[96] If a team and its corresponding management is not prepared for the challenges of a virtual team, this will be difficult to achieve.

Transactive memory rarely exists in virtual teams, and even when it does it is often not transferred to new members and contextual knowledge is not kept or well documented.[98] Development of this type of common ground is particularly difficult on virtual teams due to the indirect methods and low frequency of communication. While teams that meet in person can develop this naturally, virtual teams will often have to create it artificially and ahead of time.[96]

Virtual teams also highlight a generational gap, as may older executive and senior managers will not have as much experience with computer technology as their younger counterparts.[94][99] These senior members must then make an extra effort to catch up to the younger generation and understand this new way of communicating.

Another problem unique to virtual teams is that of differing time zones. A part of the team on one side of the world may be asleep during another part’s normal workday, and the group has to work around this. Asynchronous communication tends to be more difficult to manage and requires much greater coordination than synchronous communication.[93][94]

Team leaders will need more training, specifically in delegation. Given that, team members need to be able to share leadership responsibilities and training programs ought to be developed in recognition and support of that.[100] A contribution to this problem is that few companies have extensive expertise in how to operate and engage in virtual teams, and they create them without understanding how they differ from regular teams.[94]

Difficulties of Common Ground in Virtual Teams

Despite the improvement in telecommunication to overcome distance as an obstacle for collaboration, working in separate locations still increases the odds that people are not on common ground, and are not aware of it. Common ground, i.e. mutual knowledge, is an important element to successful communication and coordinated activity. Working separately, through technology makes it more difficult to detect and resolve misunderstandings from a lack of common ground.[101]

Technology and Common Ground in Virtual Teams

Technologies such as video with higher media richness can provide more context for common ground and are proven to be more effective in negotiation. It is important to consider the frequency of negotiations in our everyday conversations. Negotiation of meaning happens regularly especially for people of different backgrounds and cultures. Throughout all the smaller negotiations made between two actors in order to achieve common ground, it can be seen that higher media richness does in fact improve common ground. The cost and difficulties of video and other high media rich technology, and further show the disadvantages of a virtual to a collocated team.[102]

Failures to communicate and remember information about context

When it comes to distance, the need to communicate and remember differences in context often escapes the collaborators. Collaborators often assume their remote partners are in the same context, or forget that the remote partners are not, and hence fail to remember communicate about an essential contextual information to their remote partners. For instance, there have been many recorded cases of workers going offline because of a public holiday in their country, but forget that the other party they are working with in a different area does not have the same public holiday, and hence fail to communicate about the holiday.[101] This failure to communicate contextual information will inevitably cause a misunderstanding and cause people to jump to conclusions and mistrust each other. Other problems include poor decision quality[103] and wasted time needed to correct the lack of mutual knowledge.[104] Additionally, even if contextual information has been communicated, collaborators may still forget about it. This means that conclusions are again drawn with the lack of essential contextual information, causing misunderstanding. For instance, a team member may communicate to her team that she has an upcoming trip and will not be able to communicate within that time period. However, the team forgot about it and still sent her e-mail requests for immediate action while she was away.[101]

Uneven distribution of information

When digital technology is used to replace face-to-face communication, it is difficult to detect the actual messages that have been both sent and received by a receiver and vice versa. For instance, if collaborators have two email addresses, a primary and a secondary one, some messages may be sent by the server to the primary addresses and some the secondary addresses. If both partners only read messages received in the primary addresses, then a lot of information would be lost in transmission and the working partners would be on very different grounds. These working partners would be both wondering why are some messages ignored while others are received and incorrect conclusions would be drawn leading to misunderstandings. Since both partners are unaware of the root cause of their misunderstandings, it would be a long time before this problem is brought to light and by then a lot of tensions and conclusions would have been drawn by then. Errors in the distribution of messages are more common in technology than face-to-face interaction leading, to the lack of common ground.[101]

Differences in what information is salient

When it comes to face-to-face interaction, the speaker may make the importance of a message known through tone of voice, facial expression and bodily gestures. The receiver may acknowledge understanding through exact feedback called “back-channel” communication, such as head nods, brief verbalization like “yeah” and “okay” or smiles. These methods of emphasis and feedback ensure parties are on common ground. However, these same methods are absent or scarce in most digital means of communication. For example, in an e-mail exchange, it is easy to overlook the important point of the message as intended by the sender. The receiver may interpret the message differently, giving different parts of the message different priority. In the worse case, this may cause lack of action to the salient parts of the message by the receiver’s part. Fully implementing “back-channel” communication is time-consuming. The lack of convenient cues in digital communication makes dispersed collaboration less conducive for the establishment of mutual knowledge.[101]

Differences in speed and timing

Speed and timing of communication is inevitably not as uniformed in digital communication than face-to-face interaction. This is due to the fact that some parties would have more restricted access to communication than others. The differences in relative speed and timing of feedback are aggravated by differences in time zones. In some cases, the problems arising from differences relative speed may be attributed instead to a lack of conscientiousness on the part of the slower partners. In fact, a fluctuating feedback cycle is more destructive than a uniformed feedback cycle of a slower pace.[101]

Uncertainty about the meaning of silence

Messages met with silence can mean a variety of things. For example, silence can be due to technical problems within the technology that mediates the parties involved in communication, or it can be due to the fact that one of the partners is out of town and cannot reply the message. Whatever the reason, silence is a barrier to establishing common ground, firstly because of the ambiguity of silence. Silence is so ambiguous, it can be interpreted by the receiving partner in so many ways. For example, it can be taken to mean agreement, disagreement, and indifference or in the case of dispersed group – the message was undelivered. Secondly, silence blurs the notion of what is known and unknown in the group, signaling the absence of common ground.[101]

See also

References

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