Virtual Team Effectiveness

Introduction and technology needs

Based on our experience with this activity over the past 6 years, a first step after deciding to move forward is to consult with appropriate university information technology (IT) personnel to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place. The key here is to ensure that the materials needed for the activity can be accessed by participants from the different universities who are participating and that students will be able to utilize the various ICTs provided as part of this activity (e.g., chat, e-mail, wikis, and document sharing). After this step is completed, the VT activity is introduced in all classes on roughly the same date. Faculty tell students that they are about to embark on a VT project with teammates from around the country (or globe). Students are told that they will be receiving an email with their password and login information, which they can use at a site where the team task will be described. All of this ensures that each student is given the same description of the activity, regardless of any differences in universities, courses, and faculty.

Getting started

The first e-mail that students receive informs them of their assigned role in TINSEL TOWN and provides them with login information. For consistency, all students from the same university are usually assigned the same role. For example, Connecticut students might all become the VP of Marketing, whereas all Colorado students become the VP of Talent. This also keeps students from exchanging any of the unique information with peers in their classes. Within this first e-mail, students are not provided any information about the overall assignment—this information is posted on the team’s web page.

After logging in to their team’s web page, students can post and share information with other members of their assigned group. This enables faculty to post information to student teams as needed, and provides faculty with a record of the conversation threads for each team. Team conversation threads are subsequently used for grading purposes (discussed below) and to provide real examples for discussion during the debriefing session. When students first log in to their team’s site, they have access to the final recommendation sheet that is used to record and submit the team’s decision regarding which screenplays to produce as well as a memo (general memo) that describes the overall team task and the activity instructions. Specifically, teams are told that their assignment is to decide how to allocate their budget by deciding which films to produce and how much money to allocate for the marketing of each film.

Lastly, the site also directs students to their team wiki where students can add comments and attach files. In communications with the students (via both in-class discussions of the activity and in the instructions on the team sites), we emphasize that for the instructors to assess participation, students need to communicate using this wiki and the discussion threads included on the team’s web page. Teams are given 2 weeks to complete the assignment. In an attempt to provide the teams with a realistic experience, about 1 week into the assignment an additional task is added to the team website. This is a creativity task where students are asked to describe a possible sequel for one of the films that their team has decided to produce. Unlike the main team task, which is quantitative and involves calculations based on the figures provided, teams are left to decide for themselves what sequel they would like to produce, the sequel’s plot, which director and actors should be involved, and the sequel’s name.

Student surveys

Before students are assigned to teams, a survey is distributed in class asking the students about a variety of constructs such as their prior team experiences (virtual and otherwise), their technology expertise, and their propensity to trust (e.g., Mayer & Davis, 1999). In addition, we ask students to complete dimensions of the Big 5 personality assessment (Goldberg, 1999) and a number of basic demographic questions (i.e., age, sex, undergraduate major). ¹ This survey is not anonymous; students are told that this will allow us to match their initial survey results with a subsequent follow-up survey. However, students also are told that any data we collect will be kept confidential and will not affect their grades. One of the more interesting results from this survey is that students are fairly confident about their abilities to leverage web technologies. For example, in a recent semester, respondents scored 3.82 on a 5-point (1 to 5) Likert-type scale that assessed their self-perceived ability to complete tasks using various web technologies. However, 89% of students stated that they had never worked in a VT. Accordingly, while the students are confident regarding their ability to use technology, this confidence may not be fully justified within the context of VTs given their limited experience in such environments.

Following the submission of a team’s final recommendation, members are asked to complete a second survey with questions regarding the types of technology they used during the activity, their team’s processes (Mathieu & Marks, 2006), perceived team performance, as well as various affective reactions such as team viability (Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998) and team satisfaction (Gladstein, 1984). ¹ The results of these surveys enable us to provide students with comparisons across all the teams involved in the activity. This data further enables the students to not merely learn from their own experience with the activity but also to learn from the other teams involved. We often include a discussion of the survey results as part of our debriefing at the conclusion of the activity.

Team composition

The first semester we utilized this activity, we only had two universities participating and we designed three-person teams with two team members from one university and one team member came from a second university located in a different state and time zone. This setup was certainly in keeping with the reality that students might later experience when working in VTs (see Polzer, Crisp, Jarvenpaa, & Kim, 2006). However, an unexpected by-product of this setup was that students from the same school tended to meet in person even though this was discouraged. As a result, the two individuals often “overpowered” the single, geographically dispersed team member, causing that student to feel marginalized and frustrated with the activity. In the debriefing session, suggestions for handling this problem were discussed. However, in subsequent semesters, we have tried to avoid having members of a team from the same university.

In addition, in an attempt to make the activity more realistic, international students have often been added to the teams. Based on existing faculty relationships with colleagues from Japan, England, Italy, and Sweden, we identified individuals who were teaching comparable undergraduate business courses and asked whether they would be interested in participating in the activity. When teaching schedules and content have aligned, most faculty members we have asked have been favorably predisposed to having their students participate in this activity. However, different teaching schedules (i.e., semesters vs. quarters) and academic calendars can make the inclusion of international universities in this activity challenging. We have found that providing this international exposure makes the activity more logistically difficult, but it has also been extremely valuable and should prove especially beneficial to students whose jobs later require them to work with geographically and culturally diverse teams. Specifically, working with international team members forces students to plan meeting times based on an array of time zones and holidays. In addition, students have to handle language barriers and technological usage norms that can vary between countries.

Research suggests that team size can alter team functioning in both FtF and virtual contexts (e.g., Lowry, Roberts, Romano, Cheney, & Hightower, 2006). Since the first semester, we have always created four-person teams, because this size is appropriate for the TINSEL TOWN task. When international collaborations have not been possible, we have sought U.S.-based colleagues from different time zones. Again, securing different universities has been accomplished by leveraging the authors’ professional relationships. Basically we have asked our friends, coauthors, and former doctoral students if they are teaching a course where such an activity would be beneficial.

Activity description in syllabus

One of the first modifications we made to the activity was to add a thorough description of the activity to our syllabus. Recent work by Kidder and Bowes-Sperry (2012) shows that managing student expectations is important for classroom team projects. When the VT activity was not on the syllabus, students sometimes made negative comments about it during the debriefing sessions as well as on end-of-semester course evaluations. In part, these reactions could have been because they did not have the opportunity to plan for this extra assignment or because they did not like the element of surprise, which would be in line with the theoretical arguments regarding dissonance reduction (e.g., McKimmie, Terry, & Hogg, 2009). With the inclusion of this activity on the syllabus, such negative reactions have markedly declined. In addition, because the activity requires a fair amount of work and we want it to be taken seriously; having the activity on the syllabus legitimizes the learning experience that it provides.

Percentage of grade

Originally, the VT activity was ungraded. As with any team activity, there is always the potential for social loafing (e.g., Hoigaard, Safvenbom, & Tonnessen, 2006) because certain people believe that their contribution cannot be identified and so they contribute less. Research suggests that this problem may be even more serious when team members are geographically dispersed (e.g., Martins et al., 2004). Unfortunately, when our activity was ungraded, several groups had members who never logged in to the computer and thus did not participate at all. In response to these incidents, we made a couple of changes. First, a few days after the activity is introduced, each faculty asks their students how the activity is going. Typically, at this point some students express frustration that “those kids from XYZ university” have not yet bothered to log in. The professor then points out that some people from the students’ own class have not yet logged in either. There is always surprise about this, which often results in a good discussion about attributions and the dangers of assigning blame to others whom we cannot see or do not know.

More importantly, the activity is now a graded assignment, one that accounts for 15% of a student’s grade. Because the activity is now included on the syllabus and is graded, there has been a marked decrease in social loafing. However, when social loafing does occur, it provides an opportunity for a valuable discussion of techniques for handling the problem. Students are asked how team members can be motivated in VT settings, and how these practices might be similar and different from techniques that may prove effective within FtF settings.

Peer evaluations

As mentioned earlier, student feedback has suggested that in several teams, there was a student who was not pulling his or her weight. While this was certainly a frustration for their teammates, students became even more concerned about their teammates’ involvement once the activity became a graded assignment. Certainly, having each student participate is beneficial for the team’s overall performance given that each member has access to unique information that is needed to make effective team decisions. However, another student’s level of participation does not impact their teammate’s grade for this assignment given that the grading is based on the level of participation of each student based on a review of the team’s communication transcripts. As such, it is interesting that students became increasingly concerned about their teammate’s participation levels even though it had no bearing on their individual grades. To try and allay these concerns, we recently added peer evaluations to the activity.

To handle student grade concerns and instill in students the importance of evaluating the work of others, we decided to make two modifications to the activity. First, we increased the percentage of each student’s grade that was attributable to this activity to 15%. The first 10% was calculated based on the level of participation exhibited by each student, as assessed by the faculty. To that, an additional 5% of each student’s grade would be based on peer evaluation scores. Students were told about this upfront and it is listed on the syllabus and the peer evaluation form is provided to all students in advance of the activity so that they are aware of how they will be assessed by others.

Logistically, blank peer evaluation forms are posted to each team’s web page and students are asked to e-mail a completed form to their professor. Last semester peer evaluation scores ranged from 30 to 100 with an average of 89.5%. In the debriefing session, students are asked to reflect on how they assigned the peer evaluation scores, whether this was something they discussed with other team members, how surprised they were by the scores they received, and how managers ought to handle such evaluations in real work teams. This discussion can be tied into a broader discussion of 360^o feedback and its importance in the workplace. More importantly, students are asked to discuss their perceptions of how this technique works when team members never physically met. From a leadership perspective, where fairness and impartiality are paramount, students often recognize that they are more likely to “slam” people on the VT project, but would not do this for FtF teams. The learning point here is to be aware that when team members are more distant, it is easier to give harsh evaluations. Thus a manager must consider ways to avoid this problem in VTs.

In addition to ensuring that students truly participate in this activity, these adaptations also have had a side benefit of increasing the overall level of communication within the VTs. This is important because it is only via ICT communication that students learn about VT processes and leadership. In fact, during the early administrations of this activity, the average number of communication exchanges among team members was fewer than 20 per team. More recently, after making the changes described here, the level of participation has increased significantly. In fact, in the most recent running of this activity, the number of comments posted by each student ranged from zero to 50, with an average of 12. As a result, teams now communicate 53 times on average, which represents a 165% increase from the communication levels we initially observed.

Creativity outcomes

Given that VTs often perform well on less structured tasks (e.g., Nemiro, 2002), during the last three administrations of this activity, we have added a creativity task. Specifically, each team is asked to pick one of the films that it decided to produce and then describe what a sequel to that movie might look like, in terms of its plot and characters. During the class debriefing session, we spend time discussing how decisions on this more open-ended task were made. Many students claim that this was the most difficult part of the activity.

New communication channels

The final refinement that we have made is to increase the range of ICTs that students may use to communicate. We only used Blackboard at first because it provided several benefits for the administration of this activity, namely, ease of set up and the ability to keep a record of team interactions. However, only having one communication option is unrealistic. Accordingly, in more recent administrations of this activity we have added chat, e-mail, wikis, and document sharing (i.e., sharepoint). We ask that students conduct all of their conversations using the media options that we provide, so that we can keep track of their communication for grading and learning purposes. In the debriefing session, we talk about the different ICT options and how they differ with regard to media richness (e.g., Daft & Lengel, 1986). Students explain why they chose one option over another and the impact that the media richness of their chosen options might have had on the dynamics and performance of their team. Interestingly, in discussions about media richness (e.g., Daft & Lengel, 1986) prior to this activity, students often question the concept of media richness. However, when students are forced to work virtually, we often hear such comments like “I think it will be easier if we just talk on the phone about our group decision,” or “Do you think it would be easier to maybe call each other? I think it may be a lot faster. Let me know.” Again, discussing these and other quotes during the debriefing session is useful because it prompts students to analyze how and when to use different types of ICT, and how such technology might affect the dynamics and performance of VTs.

Finally, asking students to only communicate using the communication technology that we provide is starting to become difficult. Students now want to set up things like GroupMe and Skype chats, which are easily accessible and provide advantages over the media options provided. In fact, last semester a team did use a different media and then uploaded a transcript of its discussion to the team’s wiki site so that participation grades could be determined. This sort of behavior creates a dilemma for us because we have to weigh the relative importance of mimicking real-world VTs against the desire to quantify each student’s participation in the activity. We will certainly have to consider this issue more fully as we move forward.