Fluent Essays

answer the following questions on the word documentation feel free to ask when it is not clear.thank you procegea240.pdf itec_423_virtual_teams.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview Proceedings of the 2006 Informing Science and IT Education Joint Conference Relationship Building in Virtual Teams: An Academic Case Study Kathy Egea Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia k.egea@cqu.edu.au Abstract Information Technology (IT) provides the infrastructure for communication and collaboration tools for virtual teams, but Henttonen and Blomqvist (2005) suggest that it is the relational communication and factors of trust, commitment and communication that attention. This case study presents a team building strategy for such interaction. Off-campus students in an undergraduate course apply technological design concepts for social mechanisms in communication and collaboration to virtual teamwork. Students utilise the themes of conversation, awareness and coordination and document their reflection on their use over the team lifecycle. All functioning teams indicated that these social mechanisms helped to build team trust and commitment. Seventy-two percent of students indicated positive team experience, despite constraints of workload, time pressure, technology tools, distance and uncooperative team members. This study argues that use of guided and iterative reflections on social mechanisms support virtual team functioning and strengthen relationships. Keywords: academic virtual teams, success factors in virtual teamwork, online pedagogy for teamwork, communication and collaboration. Introduction Virtual teams are “groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organisational tasks” (Powell, Piccoli & Blake, 2004, p.7), or as Grundy (2004) states working virtual means working together apart. Organisational change employing virtual working enables industries to be globally competitive, provide flexible workspace, and just in time responses (Howard 2004; Powell, Piccoli & Blake, 2004). Enabling students to draw from their own reflective experiences within virtual team environments supports their transition into this community. The focus on the communication and collaboration for virtual interaction has been built on technological usage, with limited attention to importance of social relationships in teamwork (Henttonen & Blomqvist, 2005) Loughran (2004) notes that obstacles include cultural differences, lack of shared goals, communication problems Material published as part of this publication, either on-line or and lack of trust. The key, therefore for in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. successful virtual team working, HentPermission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these tonen and Blomqvist suggest, is interacworks for personal or classroom use is granted without fee tion that develops “trust through actions provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice and communicating individual roles and in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is pershared goals” (Henttonen & Blomqvist, missible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To 2005, p.117). copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Publisher@InformingScience.org to request redistribution permission. The design of technology for social online interaction is an area of study in Salford, UK – June 25-28 Relationship Building in Virtual Teams the discipline area, Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To build experience in tools for communication and collaboration, the course design implements assessment structures using virtual team tasks. Students reflect on the social mechanisms of communication and collaboration to understand the design issues in these tools. The same reflective processes are used for developing strategies to successfully work in virtual teams. This paper argues that the reflective activities within this course provide tools for ongoing team building that focus on relational communication. The reflective logs require students to consider the face-to-face constructs of communicative and collaborative work and apply them to a virtual environment. Aligned to the team life cycle of input, process and output, students are required to document their understandings of the three mechanisms (conversation, awareness and coordination) and to consider these mechanisms support team interaction Examination of student reflections indicates that the successful teams utilised the three mechanisms to improve the individual interactions in teamwork and affect the team goals. Seventy-two percent of the students indicated that the virtual team work was a positive experience, despite constraints of workload, time pressure, technology tools, distance and uncooperative team members. It is argued that the reflective process used in this activity builds social relationships creating a more success team working environment. To present this case study, the first section introduces the reader to virtual team life cycle and identified success factors and the outlines the constructs addressed by the social mechanisms for communication and collaborative technology. From this, the research question is developed. The case study is then presented, with rich levels of documentation of student responses to the three social mechanisms as they support the virtual team interaction and the achievement of the team tasks. For this study, the focus accents the relationship aspects from the data. The final section presents evidence of successful team interaction relating the three social mechanisms to positive success and relationship building Background This section presents factors that build successful virtual team environments, and the constructs under consideration for the social mechanisms of communication and collaboration. The aim is to understand the issues in virtual team successful interaction and to offer a solution through use of reflective logs in virtual team work guided by these social mechanisms. It is from this foundation that the research question is designed. Successful Virtual teams Environments Powell et al. (2004, p.7) provide a meta-analysis of 44 papers on virtual teams, covering both academic and industry teams. Their analysis is framed on Saunders’ (2000) life cycle model for virtual teams, divided into three stages. Figure 1 presents the life cycle in its three stages of Input, Process and Output. Each stage has subparts which address critical aspects of the cycle. For the Input stage, design refers to shared understanding of the team task, identification of strengths and weaknesses of team members; culture refers personal environmental influences; technical refers to knowledge of technology used by the team, and training is provided to help the team members understand interaction within a virtual content. The Process stage has two sections, socioemotional and task. The socio-emotional Process stage refers to relations, trust and cohesion which are all part of relational building within virtual teams. Task process refers to the task achievement and includes the communication and collaborative activity and the task-technology fit. Critical here is the suitability of the fit between the team tasks and the technology that is used. The final stage, the Output stage, is described in terms of personal satisfaction and team performance, demonstrating the importance of the individual in teamwork tasks. 82 Egea Input Design Culture Technical Training Process Socio-emotional Relationships Cohesion Trust Output Performance Individual satisfaction Task Communication Collaboration Task-technology fit Figure 1: Saunders’ (2000) Life cycle of virtual teams In reviewing this meta-study, and in re-reading some of the original studies and others relevant reports, the author sought to clarify key factors for success, using Powell et al’s framing. These are discussed here to provide the reader a means to measure the success of the virtual team environment presented in this case study. ‘Success’ indicators for the Input stage • • • • Team design, team training directly affects the process and output stage. Common agreement of the team’s task and individual roles varies according to personal goals and agendas evident from the start of the team life-cycle. Loughran(2004) suggests that individuals as well as teams need to benefit from the initial interaction. Positive first impressions (Coppola 2004) will aid this process. Culture tends to affect the task process and not the socio-emotional process. Inadequate understanding of a team member’s background is an extreme problem for dispersed student based teams as it is for global teams. The challenge is to find ways through the interactions with technology in order to improve awareness of individual differences. Technical competency affects team trust and individual overall satisfaction, thus opportunities to build technical training are needed ‘Success’ indicators for the Process stage • • • • Establishing social capital (Pauleen 2004) in managing distant relationships is critical to team interactions. Inclusiveness in conversation builds a sense of community and trust (Kimble, Li, & Barlow 2004). Ongoing trust include the identification of commonalities between members, performing competently, displaying concern between members and acting with integrity (Duarte & Snyder,1999). Trust behaviour in the short-cycle virtual team space is described as swift trust (Jarvenpaa, Knoll & Leidner, 1998) as it tends to be predominately task focused with positive expectations of other team members reliability based on very little real information. This trust amongst team members tends to be quickly lost when team members do not cooperate as expected. Virtual teams have immense communication problems due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. It is critical that contextual information such as workload, personal perspectives, outside factors as they affect the teamwork is conveyed to the virtual team (Loughran 2004). High performing teams built communication based on social exchanges and coped with technical and task uncertainty (Jarvenpaa & Leidner,1999) o Individuals took the initiative suggested topics and volunteered for tasks. o Communication processes become predictive and regular, with warnings of absences. 83 Relationship Building in Virtual Teams o o Regular feedback, substantive and timely, or indicative that the messages were read with activity to come at a later time. Members rotated leadership if it existed at all, moved from a rule based team behaviour to task processes and achievement, were slow to react to crisis and had the ability to ride out team problems. ‘Success’ indicators for the Output • • Task and socio-emotional processes is directly linked to performance output. Task-technology- structure aligns to both aspects of Output, Performance and Individual satisfaction. Using these guides for team success, it can be seen that two team processes are needed. It is critical to build the relationship side for team members to work cohesively in a virtual environment.. Team tasks needs to be carefully aligned to the technology used to achieve these tasks. Teams need careful guidance on methods of interaction, building parallels between face to face teamwork and virtual teamwork. Thus by training students to consider social demands within communication and collaborative practices of virtual teamwork, team trust and relationships can be enhanced. This paper attends to the social aspects of virtual interaction, particularly in the relational formation in teamwork. By applying the concepts of the three social mechanisms for communication and collaboration to guide students with their interactions, the relational building aspects of the team life cycle can be developed. Social Mechanisms of Communication and Collaboration The three social mechanisms that are covered in this study address the concept of conversation, awareness and coordination. All three concepts are necessary in building relationships with common goals, developing effective communication, and sharing tasks with effective coordination. The key ideas for face-to-face interaction extracted from Preece, Rogers and Sharp (2002) that may be useful for virtual team working and relationship building are developed below: ƒ Conversation is how people carry on a discussion. One needs to consider the rules of interaction, the implicit or explicit cues, formal or informal language, and type of interaction (synchronous or asynchronous), number of people in the conversation and dealing with breakdowns and repair mechanisms that may be required. • Awareness refers to the observations we make when in a collaborative space such as “who is around, what is happening, and who is speaking to whom (Dourish & Bly, 1992)” (Preece et al. 2002, p.124). • Coordination includes examination of shared understandings, schedules, rules and conventions that are used and external representations. Coordination takes place when a group of people act or interact together to achieve something. Collaborative activities require team members to coordinate with each other. The course taught to students in Human Computer Interaction, considers the technical implications for the design of communication and collaboration technology. Preece et al (2002, p.105) argue that “human are inherently social. It seems only natural, therefore, to develop interactive strategies that support and extend these different kinds of sociality.” This same argument is used to develop social strategy for relationship building in virtual teamwork. Research Question and Study Hentttonen and Blomqsvt (2005, p107) argue that “Information technology plays an important role in virtual teams, but virtual teamwork involves significant social redesign”. The research 84 Egea design for this study addresses this issue of social redesign by developing strategies that allow the student to understand the activities required of teamwork at each stage of the virtual team lifecycle. By linking the concepts behind the study of social mechanisms of communication and collaboration to virtual teamwork, social issues in interaction will come to the fore. Hence, given the pedagogical strategy of introducing reflective logs into the course assessment that enable students to build student understanding of the social mechanisms both in their technological use and in team work, the research questions that need answering are: (1) is interaction in the virtual team environment more successful when the three social mechanisms of communication and collaboration are applied? (2) do the reflective logs provide evidence of team building relationships over the team life cycle? To answer these questions, this case study presents the student reflections on use of the three social mechanisms of communication and collaboration in their virtual teamwork. As such the study will focus on individual reflective documentation. This is presented as individual logs over the team life cycle and final reflections of team successes. Context: The Assessment Design The pedagogical goal of this assignment was to engage students in online technology in order to understand the design requirements for developing technology for social communication and collaboration. Individual and virtual team work was the vehicle for this process. Teams presented seminars of topics within the course while peers provide feedback by reviewing their work. This is done at a shared team website, designed to cater for groups of six teams with a maximum team size of four members. A final team report summarizes this feedback and identifies communication strategies to improve the presentations, as well as examine issues in the design of collaborative technologies. The individual component requires students to complete a series of reflective logs reviewing the three mechanisms of communication and collaboration in team tasks and virtual environment. In their final report, each student presents an overall reflection on team working: positive, negatives and success factors for virtual team working. This design is the result of ongoing action-research process that examines a series of iterations in teaching approach with virtual teamwork (see Egea 2003, 2005; Egea & Gregor 2002). Team shared workspaces were initially small email lists followed by a specially designed shared website. After reviewing the personal satisfaction outcomes from these earlier course models, a more direct approach in building the relationship aspect was designed. Indicators from previous successful teams revealed that the three mechanisms of communication and collaboration naturally took place. By introducing a structured focus on the social mechanisms of communication and collaboration, the current course design developed. The three reflective logs were due at the each stage of the team life cycle, that is input (getting to know each other and share understandings of the team tasks), the process stage (both socioemotional and task process) and the output stage (performance and individual satisfaction). Each reflective log was required to rephrase the definitions of each social mechanism and note their relevance and possibly application to the team relationship. The final report after the team activity was completed, required students to summarise their logs in terms of team working, comment on positive achievements of the team experience, things to avoid in teamwork and identify the characteristics of successful virtual working. Supporting the training aspect of the input stage in the team life cycle, online tutorials were available on team work issues. They aimed at developing and improving team communication and collaboration. Topics covered include the need for a joint purpose, communication, feedback, 85 Relationship Building in Virtual Teams support and assistance, and discussed how to negotiate and deal with complexity and problem solving. Virtual teamwork guidelines were also provided based on the work of Walter, Boos and Jonas (2002). While these addressed similar topics, the virtual component stressed the value of frequent communication, confirmation receipts for incoming messages, team inclusion, early and continuous work on projects, explicitness of meaning, and creating early deadlines and adherence to them. It is noted that these supportive tools were recommended in earlier years with limited success, possibly due to the lack of integration of these tools into the assessment process. Other support included a virtual introduction template, a simulation on the shared team website and a tutorial on presentation considerations in PowerPoint slide design. The Starting Point: Input In week 1 of the term, 28 remote students (within Australia) were enrolled in the flexible program. At the end of week 2, when the teams were allocated, one student had requested that he work alone, four students had joined from Singapore, and five students had dropped the course. Since the assignment design was based on groups of 6 teams, and that past experience indicated that optimal team size was not larger than four students, two groups of 6 teams were created. Teams were grouped based on their geographic location to enable the possibility of face to face interaction and cheaper phone calls. Students were advised of their teams at the end of week 2. However, following some more student attrition, team size was reduced to 3 teams of three students, seven teams of two students and two students worked alone. Gender of the teams is indicated below in Table 1, along with the coding used to represent the individual student in the case study. Table 1: Team nomenclatur ... Purchase answer to see full attachment