A comparison of synchronous and virtual legislative session groups faced with an idea generation task

Abstract An experiment was conducted with groups of about eight people in face-to-face and geographically-distributed electronic meeting environments. While similar studies have focused on the behavior of group members working together in a single room or working individually in different rooms (a nominal group), this research looks at a hybrid environment in which part of a group is working in one room and another part is working simultaneously in a different room that is linked via a local area network, both parts forming a virtual group. Experimental results showed that such groups generated significantly more unique, quality comments than did face-to-face groups, and that participants were significantly more satisfied with that type of meeting. These and other results indicate that groups may be able to meet effectively when distributed geographically.