Abstract
The trend over the last few decades has been towards more virtual working activity, especially in technology based environments such as development teams. Previous work indicates that virtual teams face more challenges than face to face teams. It is more difficult communicating when team members are dispersed in location (including different countries) and have different working days timing constraints – all of which impact the effectiveness of individuals and the team as a whole. Results from the previous work (involving qualitative reflections from team participants and observing communication channels) indicate that individual team members have their own preferences in times and possibly the environment in which they engage in tasks and in online activity. In addition, existing literature also indicates possible preferences over individual or team-working on tasks. This paper investigates these preferences further by exploring people’s individual preferences for environments, times and, group or individual engagement in creative problem solving activity. The initial results show considerable diversity in preferences, which it is argued, need to be taken into account to improve virtual team performance on creative problem solving tasks. The paper contributes to the development of management practice for virtual groups.
Recommended Citation
Adams, Carl and Chandler, Jane, "Temporal and Environmental Preferences; Impact of Virtual Working on Creative Problem Solving" (2010). UK Academy for Information Systems Conference Proceedings 2010. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2010/2