Evaluation of User Acceptance of Virtual Environments and Interfaces for Communication in Virtual Teams

Several studies have highlighted the relevance of face-to-face communication, suggesting that computer-mediated communication can lead to decreases in group effectiveness and reduce satisfaction levels in terms of trust and comfort of its users. Supported by an experiment where the emotional or affective aspects of communication were tested, this paper validates the thesis that, from the users' perspective, there is no opposition to the acceptance of virtual environments and interfaces for communication, and that these environments are able to cope with the reconfiguration dynamics requirements of virtual teams or client-server relations in a virtual enterprise operation. For the thesis validation, the authors experimented with two architectures, the Direct Communication Architecture DCA and the Virtual Communication Architecture VCA and found that the VCA could represent a "natural" environment to cope with the new generation of organizational environments and teams, characterised by intense reconfiguration dynamics.