TY - GEN
T1 - The structuration of task-oriented communication in innovative virtual teams
AU - Chen, Yi Da
AU - Brown, Susan A.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - 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. These issues include task conflict, coordination delays, and reduced consensus in group discussions. Formal task interventions, such as imposed temporal coordination mechanisms, 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 and focusing on task-oriented communication, we identify three patterns of taskoriented communication that are essential to the function of innovative virtual teams - the degree to which task-related issues are explored, the level of concern raising or attention switches, and the level of convergence on a common task view - as well as the structural properties of the team-task environment that influence the development of task-oriented communication. We hypothesize that task interventions establish or modify these 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. The insights gained in this study can suggest the management support that an organization can offer to facilitate the communication of its virtual teams.
AB - 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. These issues include task conflict, coordination delays, and reduced consensus in group discussions. Formal task interventions, such as imposed temporal coordination mechanisms, 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 and focusing on task-oriented communication, we identify three patterns of taskoriented communication that are essential to the function of innovative virtual teams - the degree to which task-related issues are explored, the level of concern raising or attention switches, and the level of convergence on a common task view - as well as the structural properties of the team-task environment that influence the development of task-oriented communication. We hypothesize that task interventions establish or modify these 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. The insights gained in this study can suggest the management support that an organization can offer to facilitate the communication of its virtual teams.
KW - Structuration theory
KW - Task intervention
KW - Task-oriented communication
KW - Team-task environment
KW - Virtual team
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84886480307&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84886480307&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84886480307
SN - 9781627486040
T3 - International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2012
SP - 4531
EP - 4539
BT - International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2012
T2 - International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2012
Y2 - 16 December 2012 through 19 December 2012
ER -