The Blurring Boundaries Between Synchronicity and Asynchronicity

Abstract

Instant messaging is one of the most popular communication technologies in virtual teams, enabling interactions to intertwine whole working days, thus creating the sense of copresence for team members who are geographically dispersed. Through close linguistic analyses of naturally occurring data from a virtual team, this article discusses the implications of two novel communicative situations enabled by instant messaging: presence information and the persistence of transcript. The preliminary findings of this study indicate that these new communicative situations require the flouting or rethinking of previously existing interactional norms and that communicative practices employed by the team members are not yet conventionalized/normalized, the expectations and interpretations of interactional rituals and timing vary highly, even within the same virtual team.

Delivering Feedback: Supervisors’ Source Credibility and Communication Competence

“…Delivering feedback via text message may seem like an unusual occurrence in workplaces at this time, but as the workforce moves toward telework (Golden, 2009), texting may become more necessary and perhaps more accepted. In a study of virtual teams using instant messaging to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously, Darics (2014) concluded that new ways of communicating may “require the flouting or rethinking of previously existing communicative norms” (p. 352). If texting becomes more heavily used in organizational settings, particularly for the purpose of feedback, then future research can examine the notion of “channelesics” as well as the development of new norms in much greater detail in the context of workplace feedback messages.…”

Utterance Chunking in Instant Messaging: A Resource for Interaction Management

“…Research on computer-mediated conversation has documented how the structure of these interactions varies from that of spoken conversation, due to the constraints and affordances of the medium (e.g., Baron, 2010Baron, , 2013Beisswenger, 2008;Darics, 2014;Jacobs & Garcia, 2013;Lee, 2007;Markman, 2009Markman, , 2013Ong, 2011;Panyametheekul & Herring, 2003;Schonfeldt & Golato, 2003). In particular, several researchers have noted that group chat conversations can have problems with coherence, in part due to the inability to precisely time when messages arrive in the chat room (Herring, 1999;Markman, 2013;Stromer-Galley & Martinson, 2009).…”

“…Similarly, comments that threatened self-esteem increased the likelihood that participants would fail to reach an agreement in their negotiations. Other discourse-based research on workplace IM has examined how virtual team members use IM for both synchronous and asynchronous interactions (Darics, 2014), and how professionals in highly connected organizations use "quick questions" in IM conversations as a resource for collaborating on knowledge-intensive tasks (Licoppe, Cudicio, & Proulx, 2014).…”

Utterance Chunking in Instant Messaging: A Resource for Interaction Management

“…Research on computer-mediated conversation has documented how the structure of these interactions varies from that of spoken conversation, due to the constraints and affordances of the medium (e.g., Baron, 2010Baron, , 2013Beisswenger, 2008;Darics, 2014;Jacobs & Garcia, 2013;Lee, 2007;Markman, 2009Markman, , 2013Ong, 2011;Panyametheekul & Herring, 2003;Schonfeldt & Golato, 2003). In particular, several researchers have noted that group chat conversations can have problems with coherence, in part due to the inability to precisely time when messages arrive in the chat room (Herring, 1999;Markman, 2013;Stromer-Galley & Martinson, 2009).…”