Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) offer new promising opportunities to research virtual organizations and teams. The characteristics of MMOGs allow researchers to obtain objective data from a large and multi-national population. Lasting over months or even years, MMOGs facilitate longitudinal studies and ensure a high involvement of participants. Moreover, collecting data from online surveys and game servers keeps the costs of MMOG studies low. In this paper, we show with two exemplary studies how research in MMOGs can utilize these opportunities to overcome some limitations of traditional research environments. Moreover, we discuss the role of MMOGs as the avant-garde of information and communication technology (ICT) usage and therefore argue that research in MMOGs can provide a glimpse into the future application of ICT in real life organizations.
One success factor of teams and organizations is an effectively managed knowledge management system (KMS). However, these systems are even hard to develop in regular face-to-face conditions. Virtual teams as a form of geographically dispersed work arrangement offer significant opportunities for companies and organizations around the globe. But besides the advantages of those teams they pose additional challenges to the leadership and the team itself in order to achieve their goals. The question is: can virtual teams develop an effective knowledge management system? And if so, what are important drivers? In this study we are driven by the question how communication affects the building of a knowledge management system, more specifically of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a subset of KMS, in virtual teams. The paper shows how important the perceived richness and experience of the communication media used is and how the team size of a virtual team as well as the culture of the team members influence the relationship between communication and the knowledge management.
The relationship between different types of conflict and performance in virtual teams is still unclear. Therefore, this paper tries to shed light on the relationship between conflict and team performance as well as the moderating role of culture. Using survey and archival data of 1,683 virtual teams from 23 countries from a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), this study's findings show that task conflict is positively related to team performance while process conflict is negatively related to team performance. Furthermore, while collectivistic culture is positively related to performance, it also moderates the conflictperformance relationship. Whereas the team performance of collectivistic teams is highly affected by both types of conflict, team performance of individualistic teams is hardly affected by task conflict and almost not affected by process conflict. We provide a detailed discussion of our findings in the conclusion of the paper and highlight the implications for both research and practice.
H a u p t b e i t r ä g e Zusammenfassung: Die bedeutung virtueller teams für die Zusammenarbeit global vernetzter Organisationen wird seit langem diskutiert. Doch obwohl sich im alltag der unternehmen zeigt, dass diese neue Form der arbeitsteilung besondere Herausforderungen an Manager und teammitglieder stellt, werden wissenschaftliche ergebnisse und empfehlungen bisher nicht ausreichend in der Organisationspraxis umgesetzt. Dieser artikel will zum einen durch eine Darstellung der Herausforderungen und Chancen virtueller teams, zum anderen durch die präsentation wissenschaftlicher erkenntnisse sowohl Denkanstöße liefern, als auch konkrete empfehlungen für die umsetzung in der praxis aufzeigen.
Schlüsselwörter: Virtuelle Teams · virtuelle Organisationen · Führung · Vertrauen · KonflikteAbstract: the importance of virtual teams for collaboration of globally networked organizations has long been debated. but although this new form of division of labor appears in nearly all companies, which poses special challenges to managers and team members, scientific findings and recommendations have not sufficiently been integrated into practice so far. This article discusses on the one hand the challenges and opportunities of virtual teams, on the other hand wants by the gruppendyn Organisationsberat (2010) 41:289-303
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.