The Differential Impact of Communication Tool Use on Team Outcomes

Virtual teams are characterized by geographically dispersed members and technology-mediated communication (Plotnick, Ocker, Hiltz & Rosson, 2008). A common form of virtual team is partially distributed team — members within subgroups are collocated, while multiple subgroups within the team are dispersed geographically (Plotnickl et al., 2008). Previous research on virtual teams has focused on comparing the effect of computer mediated-communication and the effect of traditional face-to face communication on group process and performance (Andres, 2006; Martı´nez-Moreno, Gonza´lez-Navarro, Zornoza & Ripoll, 2008). However, virtual collaboration has become too common and sometimes irreplaceable. Instead of choosing between traditional and technology-mediated communication, teams nowadays often face the challenge of choosing among various combinations of virtual communication tools in order to enhance team effectiveness regardless of their level of geographic dispersion. The present study examined how the use of different modes of communication with different functionalities would differentially impact two critical team outcomes: motivation to work on behalf of the team and team viability. Two hundred seventeen students self-assembled into 33 project teams that worked interdependently over the course of a semester. The project was interdisciplinary in nature, with 3-4 psychology students and 3 ecology students in each team. The teams were tasked with integrating their respective expertise on human behavior and ecological issues to propose an advertising campaign designed to mitigate an ecological issue. The teams were instructed to complete three tasks in approximately 10 weeks: a) to observe and document individuals engaging in a specific behavior that contributes to a specific ecological problem; b) to design and administer a survey to assess human attitudes about that specific ecological problem and behavior; c) to create a poster for an advertising campaign that could be funded and produced by an environmental group to solve that ecological problem. Given that the teams are partially distributed, virtual communication tools including Google Group (email), WebEx (videoconference), and Basecamp (file uploads) were provided to facilitate collaboration within teams. We developed three unique indices to reflect the use of each tool. Email use was captured by frequency counts of total emails sent within each team. We operationalized WebEx use by computing the average attendance at WebEx meetings for each team. Finally, we operationalized Basecamp use by obtaining frequency counts of file uploads for each team. In order to assess team outcomes, participants completed psychometric measures of Team Viability (Bayazit & Mannix, 2003) and self-developed measure of Motivation to Work …