Giant strides in information technology at the turn of the century may have unleashed unreachable goals. With the invention of groupware, people expect to communicate easily with each other and accomplish difficult work even though they are remotely located or rarely overlap in time. Major corporations launch global teams, expecting that technology will make “virtual collocation” possible. Federal research money encourages global science through the establishment of “collaboratories. ” We review over 10 years of field and laboratory investigations of collocated and noncollocated synchronous group collaborations. In particular, we compare collocated work with remote work as it is possible today and comment on the promise of remote work tomorrow. We focus on the sociotechnical conditions required for effective distance work and bring together the results with four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration

Abstract: Corporate mergers, global markets, reduced willingness to relocate, and the increased need to reorganize and respond dynamically – we are entering an era of distributed organizations and groups. New technologies are needed that enable distributed teams to work as though virtually collocated. This case study examines how one such technology, desktop conferencing with application sharing, is used routinely by four groups within a major company. We discuss differing and evolving patterns of use. A range of difficulties arising from impoverished communication are documented. Success factors are identified, focusing on the use of technology facilitation and meeting facilitation. We conclude by describing benefits possible with this merger of communication and application sharing, as well as the challenges of organizational change that may be needed to achieve the benefits. D to main site: Does anyone in this room understand what he's saying? Remote site: I do D: You're not in this room Remote site: I'm in the global room 1.

Abstract not found

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Video and audio conferencing groups were nearly as good as face-toface, but both did show some evidence of what we term delayed trust (slower progress toward full cooperation) and fragile trust (vulnerability to opportunistic behavior).

this paper. MISQ Review articles survey, conceptualize, and synthesize prior MIS research and set directions for future research. For more details see http://www.misq.org/misreview/announce.html The associated web site for this paper is located at http://misq.org/misreview/teeni.shtml communication to a view that assesses the balance between medium and message form. There is also a need to look more closely at the process of communication in order to identify more precisely any potential areas of computer support

A research project with distributed electronic teams was conducted to examine how virtual temporary teams quickly develop and maintain trust relationships with people that they hardly know, and may never meet again, with the goal of producing interdependent work. We collected data from 14 teams of students from three different universities with the aim of providing a theoretical and empirical explanation of what temporary, distributed teams do to produce trust as a foundation for cooperative work. Our results suggest that high levels of trust were maintained in teams that engaged in continuous and frequent interaction, were more efficient in moving through the phases of the project, focused on the work content of their projects, and achieved sufficient amounts of social penetration during the first part of the project to increase their work effectiveness throughout its conclusion. The implications of trust in virtual teams are discussed.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. If, however, people meet before using CMC, they trust each other, trust being established through touch. Here we show that if participants do not meet beforehand but rather engage in various getting-acquainted activities over a network, trust is much higher than if they do nothing beforehand, nearly as good as a prior meeting. Using textchat to get acquainted is nearly as good as meeting, and even just seeing a picture is better than nothing.

Abstract not found

Virtual teams are becoming apreferred mechanism for harnessing, integrating, and applying knowledge that is distributed across organizations and in pockets of collaborative networks. In this article we recognize that knowledge application, among the three phases of knowledgemanagement,hasreceivedlittleresearchattention. Paradoxically, this phase contributes most to value creation. Extending communication theory, we identify four challenges to knowledge integration in virtual team environments: constraints on transactive memory, insufficient mutual understanding, failure in sharing and retaining contextual knowledge, and inflexibilityoforganizationalties.Wethenproposeknowledge management system (KMS) approaches to meet these challenges. Finally, we identify promising avenues for future research in this area.

Dispersed, cross-functional development teams—a particular type of virtual team—confront a wide range of knowledge-based challenges in their dispersed work. Encompassing diverse sources of task-relevant knowledge, such teams present rich opportunities for exchanging and combining knowledge—activities at the heart of an organization’s ability to innovate (Grant 1996; Schumpeter 1934). Yet empirical studies from distinct research streams indicate that both knowledge diversity and geographic separation also challenge the effective exchange and ability to leverage knowledge. This study explored how such teams interact to overcome the barriers and reap the benefits of their “built-in ” knowledge diversity. In particular, we sought to understand (1) how teams use various collaborative technologies at their disposal to share knowledge and (2) whether shared—or disparate—expectations around the use of those technologies influenced knowledge sharing practices. In-depth, multi-method field research of dispersed new product development teams in a multinational company forms the empirical basis of this work.