Start Date
14-12-2012 12:00 AM
Description
With advanced communication technologies, business managers can globally recruit talented members to form virtual teams and collaborate on innovative projects. While virtual teams enjoy superiority in their composition of talents, they also face more collaborative issues resulting from the diversity of members’ backgrounds and the limitations of communication technologies. Formal task interventions have been suggested to mitigate the severity of these collaborative issues in virtual teams. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying mechanisms through which task interventions compensate the limitations of communication technologies and facilitate the exchange of individuals’ perspectives. By adopting the lens of structuration theory, we hypothesize that task interventions establish or modify the structural properties of the team-task environment, which in turn shape virtual teams’ communication patterns. This study can provide a better understanding of how virtual teams learn to coordinate their task work more effectively by initiating task interventions.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Yi-Da and Brown, Sue, "The Structuration of Task-oriented Communication in Innovative Virtual Teams" (2012). ICIS 2012 Proceedings. 58.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2012/proceedings/ResearchInProgress/58
The Structuration of Task-oriented Communication in Innovative Virtual Teams
With advanced communication technologies, business managers can globally recruit talented members to form virtual teams and collaborate on innovative projects. While virtual teams enjoy superiority in their composition of talents, they also face more collaborative issues resulting from the diversity of members’ backgrounds and the limitations of communication technologies. Formal task interventions have been suggested to mitigate the severity of these collaborative issues in virtual teams. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying mechanisms through which task interventions compensate the limitations of communication technologies and facilitate the exchange of individuals’ perspectives. By adopting the lens of structuration theory, we hypothesize that task interventions establish or modify the structural properties of the team-task environment, which in turn shape virtual teams’ communication patterns. This study can provide a better understanding of how virtual teams learn to coordinate their task work more effectively by initiating task interventions.