Understanding the impact of communications technologies on virtual team performance: An agent-based simulation model

Abstract

Enterprises are constantly looking for ways to get the most from their geographically dispersed human resources by forming virtual teams, and leveraging communications technologies for enabling good team performance. The experience in using these technologies by virtual teams has been mixed at best, and the extant literature has gaps in offering satisfactory explanation for the variations. To address that gap, we have developed an agent-based simulation model to understand the dynamic complexities of the interplay between the characteristics of a virtual team, the task of the team, individuals forming the team, and the key functionalities provided by communications technologies, and to simulate the collaboration and work done by the team for its assigned tasks. Preliminary results point to the potential usefulness of the model to investigate the impact of communications technologies on virtual team performance. INTRODUCTIONWe study the role of communications technologies in teams that require collaboration among their members for satisfactory performance of their functions. The backdrop for this study is the emergence and rapid evolution of communications technologies that allow users to interact almost as if they were face-toface (e.g., virtual presence, multimedia, etc.). Specifically, the growing maturity of Internet Protocol (IP) based delivery of interactive voice, data and video services has triggered significant technological developments in the design and delivery of new "collaboration" oriented Unified Communications (UC) services to end-users. UC is currently in early stages of introduction and it has so far been a technology "push" primarily by vendors and service providers. However, how this technology will be used and how it will spread is unclear. Our study is motivated by a need to develop a better understanding of its applicability and use. The UC environment of the future may potentially result in distance interactions that are richer than the types of interactions today. With the growing emphasis on telecommuting employees, the UC work environment will be important for telecommuters in the future. However, Gartner Group (2008) mentioned that models for the adoption of these new services by end-users in an organizational context have not been studied extensively.The primary contribution of our study lies in the development of a theoretical model that initiates the exploration of the comparison between virtual collaboration (i.e., using communications technologies) 321 978-1-4577-2109-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

Lessons learned on development and application of agent-based models of complex dynamical systems

“…It is the study of the resultant population behaviours with respect to the heterogeneous and autonomous individuals that is one of the key advantages of agent-based modelling [4], and has led to its rapid rise in adoption over the past decade [5,6,7]. For instance, the agent-based approach has been used in a diverse range of disciplines including the modelling of: diseases in biology [8]; financial markets [9] and the British banking sector [10] in economics; the movement emergent segregation of communities within a reimplementation of Shelling's Bounded Neighbourhood Model [11] and violent crime [12] in social science; the effects of communication technologies on virtual project team performance [13] in management science; and seasonal impacts in agriculture [14]. We believe that this has been driven primarily by the ability of agent-based modelling and simulation to investigate questions regarding the causal relationships and mechanistic underpinnings to system dynamics, which traditional modelling techniques, such as differential equation-based, system dynamics (system-based models), and discrete event simulation (process-based models) cannot address [3,16].…”