Understanding Human Interaction and Performance in the Virtual Team

ABSTRACT This state-of-research review presents a stream of work that focuses on the question of whether factors that drive conventional team performance also apply to the virtual environment. Conventional teams exhibit group interaction styles that affect communication and thus team performance by facilitating or hindering the exchange of information among group members. In conventional teams, interaction style can be reliably assessed, and from that assessment, performance can be predicted. Here we present an overview of three studies that investigate human interaction and performance in the virtual setting. The first study presents the conversion of an instrument designed to assess interaction styles in face-to-face environments for use with virtual teams collaborating via the Internet. Results illustrate that interaction style predicts task performance outcomes (such as solution quality) and process outcomes (such as solution acceptance) in virtual teams in ways very similar to those seen in face-to-face teams. The second study offers a direct comparison of performance in virtual and face-to-face teams. Results show that virtual teams are less successful than face-to-face teams on most outcome measures. In addition, interaction styles explain much more variance of process outcomes than does communication mode. The third study examines the role of expertise and extraversion on interaction style and performance. Results indicate that extraversion begets a productive interaction style but that a difference in extraversion between team members leads to a negative style. We conclude with an integrative discussion and suggest additional avenues for this research. INTRODUCTION The prevailing perspective for research on virtual teams-particularly for IS researchers-is the linkage between communication technology attributes and usage, and team performance. This is so for both laboratory studies (e.g., Warkentin, et al., 1997; Ocker, et al., 1998; Tan, et al., 2000) and field studies (e.g, Maznevski and Chudoba, 2000). Conspicuously underrepresented as an independent variable in the IS literature on virtual teams is the quality of human interaction. We present a review of an empirical research stream that illustrates the critical and pervasive role that interaction plays in both the face-to-face (FTF) and the virtual context, how that interaction affects team performance on tasks that require information sharing, and how computer-based communication technologies affect the interaction dynamics and ultimately the team performance itself. Taken in sum, these studies create an important contextual perspective for virtual team, group support system (GSS), and computer-mediated communication (CMC) researchers: The effects of communication technology and its usage may be quite secondary to those that result from how the virtual group or team interacts. We begin with a more detailed description of relevant virtual team and allied research streams. Then we present the theoretical foundations of our work, a description of the research and findings to date, and conclude with some insights and suggestions for future research. DANCING AROUND THE OBVIOUS Anyone who has been assigned to work on a group or team project is immediately concerned with the quality of interaction they might enjoy with their teammates. Are these people easy to get along with? Are there some massive egos? Do we have extraverts who "hog the bandwidth" or passive folks who contribute little? Of course competency matters too, but not all competent people get along with each other, and friction can make teamwork a nightmare. Because of the relatively few prominent linkages between individual psychology and MIS, personality and group dynamics-- obvious drivers of team performance--have received little direct attention from IS researchers examining virtual teams. Personality and group interaction has, of course, been studied extensively in mainstream psychology, and some aspects have received the attention of CMC researchers. …