Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 23, Issue 5, September 2007, Pages 2558-2580
Computers in Human Behavior

Virtual team meetings: An analysis of communication and context

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2007.01.001Get rights and content

Abstract

We report a simulation study of virtual team meetings. Participants role-played companies collaborating on a design problem while supported by a range of IT tools, such as videoconferencing and shared applications. Meetings were analysed to investigate how sharing computing facilities, operating the technology, and company status, influenced communications. Significantly more talk occurred in larger teams where participants shared I.T. facilities BUT this extra talk was restricted to talk within a single location. No extra talk was shared across the virtual team via the communications link. Where facilities were shared, technology controllers dominated cross-site talk. To encourage free communication across distributed virtual teams we recommend providing each participant with their own communications facility even if this is technologically less advanced than if technology support were shared.

Introduction

New developments in information and communication technologies are predicted to have significant impacts on the workplace. The ready availability of relatively low cost access to higher bandwidth connectivity means that new forms of remote working are increasingly popular. There has been much hype around concepts such as the ‘death of distance’ Cairncross (1997). Even if such claims are exaggerated, companies are investigating new styles of organizations and ways of working. Many of these developments exploit the potential of communication and information technologies.

Martins, Gilson, and Maynard (2004) in a major review of the literature on virtual teams, conclude that ‘with rare exceptions all organizational teams are virtual to some extent.’ The term ‘virtual team’ is used to cover a wide range of activities and forms of technology-supported working. Kirkman and Mathieu (2005) propose that the term ‘team virtuality’ could be more useful as it could be used to describe ‘the extent to which team members use virtual tools to coordinate and execute team processes, the amount of information value provided by such tools and the synchronicity of team member virtual interactions’.

We report a study on one aspect of such new ways of working: the use of virtual team working in the supply chain. The study we describe in this paper is a simulation study of engineers engaged in a highly virtual work. The teams of engineers took part in a lab based study under comparable conditions, all tackling the same real engineering problem supported by multimedia technologies for distributed synchronous collaboration. We carried out detailed quantitative analyses of the way the teams communicated when the teams and their technology support, were configured into two different ways.

This study seeks to address some of the gaps in the existing extensive literature on virtual teams. As reviews of this literature such as Driskell et al., 2003, Martins et al., 2004, point out the majority of the studies that have been carried out use, student participants supported by text-based communication. The smaller number of studies which have been carried out on workplace virtual teams have again often been on teams which rely on asynchronous email communication. Martins et al. (2004) conclude their extensive review by outlining future research challenges, including ‘a need to shift away from seeking to compare virtual teams to face-to-face ones, to an examination of how the extent of virtualness affects virtual team functioning… It is imperative, though, that empirical research move out of laboratory settings and into the field …asking and answering questions that cannot be adequately tested in a laboratory setting. Some interesting questions for future research include: What are the implications of organizational power differentials among VT members?’

In this paper we attempt to do just this by studying different forms of technology support for virtual team working in the supply chain, a particularly relevant and challenging organizational context for distributed collaboration. So as Martins et al. (2004) recommend we are not comparing virtual team working with face-to-face interactions, rather we are exploring the impact of different ways of supporting distributed work in a close approximation of real working conditions in cross organizational collaboration.

A supply chain is a group of companies, so in manufacturing this starts at the top of the chain with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) such as a car manufacturer. Then at the next level there are first tier suppliers, who are companies that supply major components of the product such as braking systems. At the next level down the chain are second tier suppliers who are manufacturers of sub-components (e.g. producers of brake shoes). In a supply chain, individuals from different companies have to communicate. As product development becomes more complex, they also have to collaborate more closely than in the past. These kinds of collaborations almost always involve individuals from different locations, so virtual team working supported by IT, offers considerable potential benefits. To reiterate, here we use virtual team working to mean synchronous work supported by information and communication technologies. In the study reported in this paper this involved video conferencing tools, shared white boards and shared access to other forms of IT support for active collaborative working on joint tasks.

Virtual teaming has been very enthusiastically advocated by many authors in management and business such as Grenier and Metes, 1995, Snow et al., 1996, Lipnack and Stamps, 1997. More cautious or negative views have also been voiced by authors such as De Meyer, 1991, Nohria and Eccles, 1992, Handy, 1995 and most notably Olson and Olson (2000). One important dimension to virtual team working is communication. This provides one method for evaluating the effectiveness of virtual team working. Good communication flow within organizations is considered to be important in complex business environments (e.g. Innovation in Manufacturing Industry, 1991). Good communication among team members has also been reported to be important if team working is to operate successfully. Communicative difficulties in traditional and virtual teams have been found to relate to poor performance (e.g. Carletta et al., 1998, Mathieu et al., 2000, Thompson and Couvert, 2003). If companies are to benefit from introducing virtual team working then good communication seems desirable.

Many of the acknowledged challenges of effective virtual team working, focus on ensuring good communication among all members of the distributed team. For example, Jarvenpaa and Leidner (1999) found that regular and timely communication feedback was key to building trust and commitment in distributed teams. Kayworth and Leidner (2000) from studies of virtual teams where members were distributed around the world, concluded that frequent ongoing communication was essential for success. Blackburn, Furst, and Rosen (2003) found that developing a common sense of purpose was more difficult in virtual teams as there was less intensive communication and interaction. Richer communication media are held to offer advantages for virtual team working, and authors such as Kayworth and Leidner (2000) are optimistic that the wider availability of these media will overcome many of the communication problems of virtual teams. There is however, relatively little detailed empirical evidence on the impact of different forms of multimedia communication on patterns of communication in the workplace.

A few researchers have reported studies of virtual teams in action, using multimedia support for their synchronous collaborations. These studies of virtual team meetings among work groups, have shown some communicative differences in style. Turn exchanges were different, with lengthier contributions and more formal handovers in virtual meetings (O’Conaill, Whittaker, & Wilbur, 1993). Technology support led to shorter meetings that were more problem-centered interactions than face-to-face workplace interactions (O’Conaill et al., 1993, Tang and Isaacs, 1993, Tang et al., 1994). There are a greater number of empirical studies of virtual meetings among participants in lab-based studies, although most of these use text based communications, a few do report studies of technology supported spoken interactions such as video conferences. For example Sellen (1995) reported few differences in the communications among users of very different video communication systems, Olson, Olson, and Meader (1995), and Doherty-Sneddon et al. (1997) both reported that video supported teams performed as well as those in face-to-face meetings though distributed teams had to spend more time in clarifying their contributions to the meetings. Anderson et al. (1999) also reported equally successful outcomes in distributed video-linked groups but more difficulties in handling smooth transitions between speakers. Sanford, Anderson, and Mullin (2004) reported the impact of different configurations of audio link on the communication patterns in videoconferences, with surprising benefits for apparently more artificial ‘click to speak’ systems over open channel communication. For a review of experimental studies of virtual teams see Driskell et al. (2003).

The supply chain provides a fascinating environment in which to investigate the impacts of technology-supported working. This environment highlights the complexities of the work place with its networks of social and organizational relationships between individuals and companies. In the past a manufacturing company (an OEM) would have a dominant role with its suppliers, determining the specifications for requirements and waiting for suppliers to compete for orders to supply the required components. Now complex products are designed much more collaboratively with the suppliers being involved in the design process. The production of a new car for example involves different companies in the supply chain acting more as partners in a joint manufacturing exercise. The introduction of virtual team working in theory fits well with these larger organizational changes. It is not clear in practice how traditional status and hierarchical relationships will influence the nature of communication in virtual meetings.

Studies of communication in the workplace have shown that higher status individuals tend to dominate face-to-face business meetings (e.g. Carletta et al., 1998). One of the frequently cited advantages of early research on email communications within organizations, was the equalizing effect, with studies showing that email reduced the influence of status and allow freer and more equal patterns of communication, (Dubrovsky et al., 1991, Kiesler and Sproull, 1992, Sproull and Kiesler, 1986). In contrast, Saunders, Robey, and Vaverek (1994) report that status differentials were maintained in text-based conferences. For ‘richer’ communication media (Daft & Lengel, 1984) we know much less about how status and communication technologies interact. In a study of audio conferencing in the workplace, France, Anderson, and Gardner (2001) found that effects of status on communication were considerably larger in audio conferences than face-to-face meetings. In this paper we explore if status within the supply chain impacts upon communication in virtual team meetings and if multimedia support technologies can be implemented to overcome any such influences.

In a previous study of virtual teams in the work place we utilized several research methods and data gathering techniques, including, interviews, questionnaires, and observations of virtual team meetings (Carletta, Anderson, & McEwan, 2000). As is common in workplace studies we observed many fascinating examples of virtual team behaviour and communication, but our sample was fairly small and the variation between virtual teams meant that our analyses were not conclusive. From our observations of two virtual teams in the workplace it appeared however, that the way in which the support technologies were implemented affected communication among the virtual team members.

One of the potential advantages of virtual team working is the ability rapidly to recruit additional members with relevant expertise (e.g Lipnack & Stamps, 1997). When the need to travel and commit to face-to-face interactions is removed, larger virtual teams perhaps with a more fluid membership, become a viable economic option for organizations. In our workplace observations of virtual teams, the ability to involve and receive input from a wider set of individuals, was perceived as a potential benefit by companies. So virtual teams may involve a larger number of members than traditional co-located teams. How can the technologies be configured to support teams with larger numbers and an evolving membership? There are two potential solutions. The first is to equip each individual with their own set of multimedia support tools, for communication and collaborative designing, etc. This of course has certain financial and organizational implications, in the time and resources needed to support a variety of computer work stations with high bandwidth connectivity and a set of multi media collaborative work tools. The second is to have several team members share specially equipped computers.

In this study we compare the impact of these two configurations on the communication processes in virtual teams. The need to share facilities of course only arises when the virtual team grows beyond a certain size, so the comparison of necessity conflates the sharing of the equipment with the size of the team. The issue we wished to explore is whether the presence of extra team members does provide benefits to the team, notably in terms of the flow of ideas and communication, when these extra team members have to share the virtual team technologies.

The literature on group size and technology is inconclusive. Some studies suggest that the use of technologies (again usually text based communications) can overcome the problems noted with larger face-to-face problem solving groups where ideas can be blocked. So in virtual teams in contrast to face-to-face teams, more ideas have been recorded as the size of the group grows (e.g. Gallupe et al., 1992). When richer communication media are used the picture can be rather different, Riopelle et al. (2003) found that larger groups had more difficulties communicating than smaller groups when using audio conferencing. Anderson (2006) found that even an increase from 2 to 3 members increased the communicative effort required to achieve task success, in both face-to-face and video conference interactions.

In our workplace observations of virtual teams (Carletta et al., 2000) we felt that teams did not always maximize the benefits of having extra members with additional expertise because of the way the technology support was implemented. For example, we observed a virtual team where the members convened a relatively lengthy meeting with several members at each site sharing the communications technology on a single work station. In this virtual meeting the communication among the virtual team members seemed less than optimum.

We found that there was little free interaction across the communication link, and instead this vital cross-site communication was directed through a single team member in each company – the one who was operating the technology. Even when information was being exchanged between two people at different locations who were not operating the technology, communication appeared to be ‘squeezed’ through the people at the keyboards. These individuals dominated the conversation between sites. This was not because of technology limitations as the technology supported spoken conversation and each team member could easily speak to colleagues at the other site. In practice this rarely happened. The person who controlled the computer interfaces who seemed to become a de facto company spokesman.

In contrast we observed a virtual team that used the technology to have shorter meetings, with only one participant at a single workstation. This technological configuration seemed to elicit freer communication. In addition the status of the companies involved appeared to impact on the process of the virtual team meeting and its communication, with participants from the OEM seeming to have a dominant role in the virtual team meetings.

These observations suggested that technologies may be implemented in the workplace in ways that overturn the potential advantages of communications technology to support free communication across the team. This could have serious consequences. Given the size of the field study these conclusions were only tentative, but as the issue seemed of potential importance we decided to explore it more fully. We designed a study to test these concepts in a lab simulation with a larger number of participants. We investigated how the form of virtual team implementation impacted on communications across the team. We were particularly concerned with how the sharing of facilities influenced communication.

To do so we also had to address one of the methodological challenges of studying the impact of the introduction of new forms of computer supported activities. Observational studies in the work place provide insights about the impact of computers in real organizational settings. The richness of such contexts means that there is little or no control over the people or behaviors observed. One virtual team meeting will differ from another on a wide range of dimensions, such as the topics being discussed in the meetings, the length of the meeting, the experience of the team members, the organizational and social relationships between them, and the way the computer technologies have been implemented. This means it is very difficult to interpret the causes of behavior that are observed during a virtual meeting.

Laboratory studies of computer-supported interactions, offer the advantages of careful control of a number of relevant variables, and thus repeated observations of meetings on identical topics in identical situations. The trade-off for these advantages is that the participants are usually unfamiliar with one another. Participants are also often tackling simple and artificial tasks about which they have no expertise and so may have little real engagement in the task.

In the study reported here we attempted to capture some of the advantages of both types of research. We used what we called a ‘simulation study’ methodology. We recruited participants with relevant real world expertise to play the roles of members of a virtual supply chain team solving a problem. We used a real engineering problem that had emerged in some of our work place studies. This was a complex and engaging problem with no one simple solution. The same problem however was presented to all the distributed teams in our study who had equal time to meet and to complete the task. The teams all had access to the same background information and their computer configurations were controlled. The focus of our research was on how the technology configurations influenced patterns of communication.

We focus on communication for a number of reasons for this. First we believe that careful analysis of the communication process, allows us to obtain a rather rich and detailed picture of the virtual interaction, in ways which simple questionnaire responses or single performance measures do not. Secondly there is a fairly well established set of findings on the impacts of various forms of technology support which shows that participants show considerable perseverance and adaptability and will often complete tasks successfully using a wide variety of communication media. It is the analysis of the associated communication that often provides insights into how easy or difficult achieving this outcome has been, depending on the available communication facilities. These patterns have been shown from the seminal work of Chapanis and colleagues onwards (e.g. Anderson, 2006, Anderson et al., 1997, Chapanis, 1988, Sellen, 1995).

From our observations in the field, and the existing virtual team literature, we drew up the following experimental hypotheses:

  • H1: Communication across a distributed virtual team, will differ when members share a communications facility compared to when each has his or her own.

  • H1A: Virtual teams with more members, even if they have to share a communication facility, should benefit in terms of the amount of communication and ideas exchanged across the virtual team.

  • H2: When virtual teams share communications facilities, the individuals who control the computer interface will contribute more cross-site talk than other team members. This effect will be restricted to such cross-site interactions and so will not just arise from the general dominance or loquacity of such individuals.

  • H3: Communication will be influenced by the status of organizations within the supply chain.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 70 participants (all male) were recruited and randomly allocated to the shared facility or individual control condition of the study. All teams were virtual, that is they collaborated with colleagues at a different location. In the shared facility condition there were 52 participants who formed nine distributed teams of 4–7 individuals, with 2–4 individuals at each company site. This configurations, with larger teams with several members at each computer, is the experimental analogue

Communication analysis

To explore the impact of technology configuration and organizational status on communication in virtual team meetings, three different types of communication analyses were carried out. We investigated the amount of interaction among team members, the content of the discussions and the patterns of interaction among team members.

One of the sessions from the shared control condition was omitted from the analysis due to inconsistencies in the experimental procedure (leaving eight sessions in the

Discussion

We wished to explore the nature of communication during virtual team meetings. In the workplace we had observed and analysed of a small number of virtual team meetings, where employees in different companies used multimedia IT tools to support their collaborative working. We had hypothesized that the ways these facilities were implemented and the relative status of the organizations, impacted on the communication process (Carletta et al., 2000). Here we wished to explore these factors in a

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the members of the EC ACTS project AC070 TEAM project at the University of Warwick, for their assistance and use of the TEAM technology for this study.

The research described here was supported by a Grant (L125251033) from the UK Economic and Social Research Council under their Innovations Programme to C. Dent and A. Anderson.

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