RESEARCH ON PROXIMITY CHOICES FOR DISTRIBUTED,ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATIVE WRITING GROUPS

Abstract This paper investigates whether using variations in proximity choices can improve outcomes of distributed,asynchronous collaborative writing (CW) teams that work on the Internet. This paper reports preliminaryresults of a field experiment on asynchronous collaborative writing using 550 participants over a month anda half. It is found that groups that met face-to-face for convergence processes had no advantages over groupsthat did all their work asynchronously and distributed. This supports the notion that with correct processesand tools, distributed groups can be just as effective as face-to-face groups. Introduction This paper investigates using variations in proximity choices 1 to improve outcomes of distributed, asynchronous collaborativewriting (CW) teams that work on the Internet. The underlying research question for this research is whether asynchronous,distributed work can be a strategically advantageous form of work, compared to face-to-face (F2F) work. In other words, shouldall-asynchronous, distributed groups necessarily suffer outcome and process losses because they have never met F2F? However,before proceeding with the details of this research, this section emphasizes the growing importance of distributed CW as a formof tele-work.CW is a critical form of professional communication that can be more effective than single-author writing (Gere & Abbott, 1985)and is ubiquitously performed in industry and academia (Couture & Rymer, 1989; Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Gordon, 1980).Moreover, while CW is already pivotal to many group processes, it is likely to increase in importance and complexity becauseof the increased use of distributed work, driven by increased globalization, competition, and Internet usage. Since CW is asignificant form of group work, as distributed group work increases, distributed CW will also likely increase in usage. By 199 8,over 17% of industry meetings involved remote participants (Simons, 1998), and it is likely to increase in prevalence over time(Burke & Chidambaram, 1994). Two key reasons exist why distributed work will continue to increase and thus drive an increasein CW work: (1) increased globalization and competition (Hax & Majluf, 1991; Horton, Holman, & Bess, 1992; Johansen et al.,1991) (2) increased Internet usage, because of increased globalization and increased Internet usage that is transformingorganizations (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000; Mandel, 1999).Given that CW is an important form of group work that is increasingly conducted in tele- or distributed settings, the rest of t hispaper investigates whether or not all-asynchronous CW groups can be just as effective as CW groups that also use F2F meetings.First, this paper explores the theoretical implications of proximity choices in asynchronous CW. The resulting hypotheses aretested using a field experiment of 550 participants using a Java-based CW tool called, Collaboratus, a Java-based CW tool furth erexplained in (Lowry, 2002; Lowry, Albrecht, Nunamaker Jr., & Lee, 2002). The results of the field experiment withcorresponding contributions, limitations, and future research opportunities are then presented.