Team Leaders' Technology Choice in Virtual Teams

Communication in Virtual Teams: Ten Years of Experience in Education

“…Nevertheless, experiencing working in a virtual team needs to be added to the bibliographic knowledge. Students have to face the realities of building mutual knowledge [19] and coordinating their vision of time and activities [20]. An introductory lecture illustrating how to plan is delivered by one of the instructors.…”

“…The students use the Blackboard learning suite as the central repository for their work. They are free to use any additional tools they consider beneficial in keeping with established practice [20]. Tools that are typically used include chat, internet-protocol telephony, and videoconferencing.…”

“…By so doing, the ICT does not get in the way of the team dynamic, and the team and subgroups within the team can maximize their productivity across time and space. Often, however, this will initially mean different technology preferences as a function of subgroup cultures within the team [20]. …”

Team Climate and Media Choice in Virtual Teams

“…Contextual factors that may influence actual media choice include urgency and importance of a decision, proximity, accessibility, effort, time, and task pressure. For example, a study by Sivunen and Valo (2006) on media choice suggests that there are two main social factors (i.e., accessibility and social distance) and two main task-related (i.e., idea-sharing and informing) factors that influence media choice in virtually communicating teams. Social presence (Köhler, 1999) very high low medium low Media richness (Daft and Lengel, 1986) high low medium low (Kock, 2005) Synchronicity (Dennis et al, 2008) high low medium medium -Information transmission fast slow fast medium -Information processing low high low low-medium…”

Multiple Media Use in Organizations: Identifying Practices Leading to an Alignment Paradox

“…This paper aims at elaborating the limited knowledge we have regarding the characteristics of multiple media use patterns and the consequences that may follow from this use. Existing research has been dominated by a focus on the use of single media, such as the use of cell phone and short messaging service (SMS) (Ling, 2005), instant messaging (Quan-Haase, Cothrel, & Wellman, 2005), video conferencing (Martin & Rouncefield, 2003), groupware (Tam & Greenberg, 2006;Vreede & Guerrero, 2006), email (Belloti, Ducheneaut, Howard, Smith, & Grinter, 2005), or the comparison of different media (Sivunen & Valo, 2006). The valuable insights and knowledge gained in this research largely ignores the characteristics and consequences involved in the use of multiple media in organizational settings.…”