Real Projects, Virtual Worlds: Coworkers, their Avatars, and the Trust Conundrum

Problem Statement By providing immersive, three dimensional environments where users can meet and communicate through avatars, or their graphical and fully customizable online alter egos, virtual worlds can replicate face-to-face meetings (Davis, Murphy, Owens, Khazanchi, & Zigurs, 2009; Schultze & Leahy, 2009). Unfortunately, minimal research exists into the application of virtual worlds on virtual project teams for real project management success (Davis, et al., 2009; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009). This is a concern because virtual worlds present a paradox: they can mimic face-to-face communications to restore the visual cues that foster trust (Cowell & Cowell, 2009; Davis, et al., 2009) but their avatars' identities may diverge from their owners', thus potentially undermining that trust (Galanxhi & Nah, 2007; Wolfendale, 2007). Since virtual team members may never physically meet, it is unclear how this will affect virtual team member trust and project success when avatars are used for project communication. Research Questions The researcher addressed these research questions: 1. When the goal is real project success, what impact will communication using avatars have on team trust? If the impact is negative, how might it be improved? If the impact is positive, why? 2. When the goal is real project success, will certain types of avatar personas have more or less effect on the establishment of team trust and why? Will specific personas have more effect, less effect or a neutral effect on team trust? Review of Literature Economic considerations drive companies to distribute project work to places where skills can be procured at lowest cost. However, business best practices confirm co-locating project teams promotes success (The Project Management Institute, 2004). IT industry trends reinforce this comment. For example, with its short development sprints, intense scrums of developers, and story and backlog management, the Agile development method requires tight, fluid relationships between developers and users and was designed for co-located teams (Nottonson & DeLong, 2008). The Agile development method is gaining acceptance because it helps organizations absorb change so it is not surprising offshore vendors have adapted their processes to fit the approach. Unfortunately, implementing Agile in distributed settings requires overhead that saps the responsiveness for which it was designed. For instance, Sureshchandra and Shrinivasavadhani (2008) described a process for distributed software development using Agile. Despite their assurances that such arrangements become easier to manage over time, the contrast between the overhead required to implement the Agile development method on distributed teams and the lack of overhead required when applying it on co-located teams is striking. Virtual worlds are poised to ease this tension between the pull to co-locate and the push to decentralize project teams by providing a vehicle for simulated co-location. This literature review explores this tension. It covers massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual world research, business and project management, virtual meetings, virtual simulations, virtual social spaces, avatars, trust and identity. MMORPG and Virtual World Research, Business and Project Management Virtual world research started with an emphasis on gaming and evolved to consider virtual worlds. Therefore, any assessment of the research literature must consider these two focus areas. MMORPGs and virtual worlds share the same architecture (Alterbosch, Pierce, & Simmons, 2008; Kumar et al., 2008). They differ only in their development approaches, with MMORPGs employing proprietary models and virtual worlds employing open source models (Arakji & Lang, 2007). Since they share the same foundation, findings discovered in one genre are transferrable to the other. …