Collaboration Archives - Leading Virtually

No Email Reply? Don’t Let an Unanswered Email Get the Better of You

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:03:58 +0000

Technology is meant to connect us. Instead, it often creates feelings of isolation. Such as when there’s no reply to our emails. We don’t care as much when our email to a company’s customer service is unanswered but when we send it to someone we know or an individual we are trying to establish contact with, not receiving a reply leaves us unsettled.

Why?

Don’t we encounter silence in a face-to-face situation too? Why doesn’t that unsettle us?

Silence in a face-to-face situation can be awkward too. But it can be resolved quickly by reading the other person’s body language or by simply asking a question. If the question is unanswered, we may still be able to make sense of the silence by using the greetings and the small talk we exchanged (or their lack) that day with the other person.

In the absence of such possibilities in a virtual situation, silence no longer remains as such.

It produces thunder!

We begin to think of all possible reasons behind the silence. In a world where people have constant access to email, we find it very strange and shocking that the receiver has not responded. Distress, feelings of isolation and loss of control, frustration, anger, negative self-appraisal, bad mood, and a host of related effects occur as a consequence of email silence. Damage to one’s relationship with the unresponsive individual is usually not far behind.

Often, these reactions are unjustified. Why? Because it may not be as bad as you think.

Quite often, the other person is very busy or immersed in something else due to which our message is put away for a response later. But then the receiver gets caught up in the daily routine and our message remains unanswered despite good intentions. And we may erroneously conclude that the receiver doesn’t care about us or our email. In a NY Times article about unanswered emails, someone mentioned that she sometimes doesn’t have the time to give a careful response and puts off responding till later. Eventually, time goes by and after some time she feels that she has waited too long and is embarrassed. What does she do? She does not respond! So, you see, you may have not received a response because someone cared too much and not less!

Sure, there are times when things are really wrong because of which there is no response. In a research study, Catherine Cramton found that the US members of a virtual team misjudged the silence of their Portuguese partners after an electronic vote as consent when, in fact, the latter were expressing their disagreement with the chosen idea. You may have someone playing games with you by not responding — that individual may simply be trying to get an upper hand in the relationship with you. Then there are occasions when we are expecting some favor from the receiver of our email and the receiver wants to turn down our request but, instead of embarrassing us, does not respond.

So, there are times when email silence isn’t bad and there are other times when it is. Did someone say that email silence can be confusing?

Can we do something about it?

In virtual teams, we can reduce email silence considerably by drawing up a team compact in which we outline the rules of engagement. These rules of engagement typically cover expectations about email communication, including acceptable delay in responding to emails.

But we experience many situations outside of virtual teams in which our emails go unanswered. How do we deal with such situations?

For that we first need to look at some research. Research by Yoram Kalman and Sheizaf Rafaeli on response latency in electronic communication indicates that about 80% of responses get posted within the average response time and 97% of the responses get posted within 10 times the average response time. This is true for responses in various kinds of computer-mediated communication systems, including email and group discussion forums. Using the Enron email dataset, the authors found that the average time to respond to an email was about 29 hours. If we assume that this figure applies elsewhere too, then there’s a 80% chance that your email will get responded to within 29 hrs. Even if it does not get responded to within this time, there’s still about a 17% chance that your email gets will get responded to within another 11 days. After that, assume that the silence is for good.

Thus, research suggests that we wait for about 12 days before taking action for lack of response to our email. Of course, to the extent our email is time sensitive, we would need to act before that. Also, we need to be sensitive to individual differences. For some individuals, the average response latency may be more or less than the 29 hours we have assumed. To the extent we know enough about someone’s email behavior, we would need to adjust for that too. One recourse when we encounter silence might be to resend the email if we believe that the receiver may have simply forgotten. When we are uncertain, research suggests that a more effective action might be to make our request via another medium, such as the phone. For very critical emails, I have found it to be effective to let the recipient know that I would be following up by a certain date to see if there is any part of my email or request that needs additional clarification. If I don’t get a response by the follow up date, I call (or, if possible, stop by the persons office) to check if there are any questions or issues I can address. If there are any bad news, they come out during that call (or visit).

If none of the above actions work, don’t let the silence get the better of you. If you are seeking something very critical from the unresponsive person, figure out another way to get it. Else, it may be time to move on. If a response comes out of the blue in the future, as it sometimes does, count it as a blessing!

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How Important Is It To Manage Temporal Diversity in Virtual Teams?

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:44:34 +0000

During the last weekend, I had a chance to observe a couple of workers who were installing new backsplash in my kitchen. One of them was setting the tiles as quickly as he could. It was clear that he wanted to finish his task and get out as quickly as possible. The other went about his work patiently. He took measurements for tiles to be set at the edges, cut the tiles according to measurement, and finally set those tiles. When setting the tiles he had cut, he would look over the work of the first worker and tweak the tiles on the wall in case they were not aligned properly. Occasionally, the first worker would question him about what he was up to and he explained that the alignment of the tiles was not proper and he was fixing it. I remember the first worker telling the second one that it wasn’t a big deal if the tiles were not perfectly aligned. The second worker responded that he felt uneasy if the alignment wasn’t proper. “The quality of what we produce is important to me,” he added.

What I saw in action were two individuals, one who emphasized speed and the other who emphasized quality, somehow balancing their differences in a way that helped them perform effectively as a team. I wondered if this is what happens in a team when team members differ in terms of their emphasis on speed, quality, and other performance goals. Does such diversity help a team address different and, oftentimes, competing team performance expectations that are typical for many teams? Or does it create conflict among workers and hinder team performance? Are there any ways in which this diversity can be managed so that it benefits rather than hinders team performance? Interestingly, these questions were quite similar to those that motivated a recent study reported by Susan Mohammed and Sucheta Nadkarni in the Academy of Management Journal. The authors examined how team temporal diversity can be effectively managed to maximize team performance. Certainly, there is more to diversity within a team than just temporal diversity but what Mohammed and Nadkarni found helped me get closer to the answers I was seeking.

Dimensions of temporal diversity
Mohammed and Nadkarni defined temporal diversity as variations in members’ time urgency, pacing style, and time perspective.

Time urgency is a personality trait that reflects how concerned someone is about conserving time. Time urgent individuals feel that time needs to be conserved. They feel chronically hurried and are continuously focused on how much time is remaining for an activity. On the other hand, those who are not time urgent don’t feel highly constrained by time. They feel less hurried and are not concerned with the passage of time.

Pacing style refers to how individuals pace their effort when working towards deadlines. People vary from those who begin working on their tasks right away (early action individuals) to those who start working close to the deadline (deadline action individuals). In between, you find steady action individuals who spread out their work evenly.

Time perspective reflects the importance given by an individual to past, present, and future time frames. Those with present time perspective tend to focus on immediate pleasure, take more risks, and plan only for the near future whereas those with future time perspective tend to be highly goal-oriented, consider future consequences, and plan beyond the near future.

Temporal diversity can help but you need temporal leadership
Mohammed and Nadkarni viewed temporal diversity as helping a team perform better provided it is managed appropriately. They suggested that one way in which temporal diversity could be managed is via temporal leadership. They defined temporal leadership as the extent to which team leaders scheduled deadlines, synchronized team member behaviors, and allocated temporal resources. According to the authors, strong temporal leadership helps the team reduce the problems associated with temporal diversity and put it to work to meet diverse performance expectations, thereby helping team performance. On the other hand, weak temporal leadership, the authors contended, hinders team performance by failing to curb the problems arising from temporal diversity and being unable to put it to good use.

The results from the study that Mohammed and Nadkarni conducted using 71 teams from a process outsourcing provider firm in India supported the authors’ contention that temporal diversity can help a team perform better if temporal leadership is strong. They found that time urgency and pacing style diversity were more positively related to team performance when temporal leadership was stronger. In other words, teams can benefit from having a mix of high and low time urgency members as well as a mix of those who differ on how they pace their assignments. But to get this benefit, team leaders must set milestones, prioritize tasks, remind members of important deadlines, build time for contingencies, pace the team members, and coordinate team members’ efforts to help the team meet its deadlines. If they don’t, then diversity may harm rather than benefit team performance. Mohammed and Nadkarni did not find diversity in future orientation as playing any role in influencing team performance.

Mohammed and Nadkarni found another interesting result: strong temporal leadership improved team performance, irrespective of whether temporal diversity in the team was high or low.

What does this mean for virtual teams?
Virtual teams, or teams engaged in remote work, often consist of individuals from different cultures. Individuals from different cultures tend to have different visions of time. Americans, for instance, possess a clock vision of time and see time as a scarce commodity which must be conserved. Those belonging to the Hindu or Buddhist culture, on the other hand, adopt a timeless vision of time. They view the world as engaged in simultaneous destruction and creation. In such a view, the passage of time is not important because whatever goes, comes back again. Whatever is happening today will happen again in the future. Such differences among team members are likely to introduce temporal diversity within the team and create an opportunity for enhancing team performance with the help of temporal leadership.

Leaders of teams engaged in remote work can create temporal leadership within a team by helping it develop a team compact and regularly conduct after action reviews (AARs). The development of a team compact helps a virtual team set milestones and prioritize tasks. It helps the virtual team coordinate its efforts — the team assigns clear tasks to its members and creates a schedule for the work due from the members. The team also creates a timetable for team meetings and conducting AARs. During the development of a team compact, members of a virtual team also agree to how soon they will respond to messages from each other. When a virtual team conducts AARs, it gets an opportunity to revisit the team compact and review how it is faring in terms of following its schedule and meeting its milestones and deadlines. During the AARs, the team may also change its schedule or create a contingency plan for the remainder of the project if necessary.The development of the team compact and conducting regular AARs, therefore, give the whole team the opportunity to engage in temporal leadership and manage the temporal diversity that may exist in the team. By letting the whole team engage in temporal leadership rather than imposing a set of task assignments and a delivery schedule on them (as it happens in the case of team charters), team leaders increase the likelihood of team members responding effectively to temporal leadership and working together to improve team performance.

Even though team compact and AARs are useful tools for a team engaged in remote work, they are not always embraced enthusiastically. Mohammed and Nadkarni’s results have provided me with a strong justification for recommending the team compact and AARs to virtual teams. I often get quizzical looks when I recommend these tools to the virtual teams that I supervise. Team members see the development of a team compact and conducting AARs as trivial exercises with little value. They sometimes argue that they are professionals and they don’t need to be reminded regularly that they have to complete their work. What I see missing in these individuals is the realization that they are working in a team and that there are bound to be differences in how each individual approaches the work assigned to that individual. As the study by Mohammed and Nadkarni demonstrates, team members may differ on the basis of time urgency and pacing style. While each team member may approach their individual work professionally, because they have to work with each other, they need to manage their individual differences related to time urgency and pacing style. In fact, by managing their individual differences, they may be able to harness their different traits or styles to benefit team performance. Even if there is no temporal diversity in the virtual team, creating a team compact and conducting regular AARs provide opportunities to the team to engage in temporal leadership and improve team performance.

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Can Using Facebook Within Your Organization Add Value?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:35:54 +0000

I often hear from business leaders that while they see some value in using Facebook for business-to-customer interactions, they see little value in using it internally. They argue that the use of Facebook to engage in social chit-chat will distract employees from their work and make them unproductive. I believe that these business leaders are not seeing the value of the social interaction that is facilitated by a tool such as Facebook. Research tells us that social interaction is very useful for facilitating knowledge transfer and innovation in organizations. It is, therefore, not surprising that some companies are reporting significant benefits from the internal use of Facebook or a similar tool.

The value of social interactions

W. Tsai and his colleagues have published findings that demonstrate the value of social interaction within a company. In one of their studies, the authors found that social interaction across business units led to the exchange and combination of resources (e.g., knowledge, service, products) by individuals within those business units. This effect occurred both directly and via the facilitation of trust among individuals. The exchange and combination of resources, in turn, was related to product innovation in the organization. In another study, Tsai and his colleagues found that when members of different business units interacted socially, they also transferred more knowledge. Additionally, this effect of social interaction on knowledge transfer became stronger the more the business units competed with each other for market share. The logic behind this effect is similar to that behind the adage ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ Essentially, when your unit is competing with another, there is greater incentive to learn what those units are up to so that you can benchmark yourself and compete more effectively. Since the competing unit shares the same resource constraints and market situation as your unit, there are also greater opportunities for synergistic activities.

Research from Gallup provides additional support for why social interactions might be useful. Using data from its employee engagement questionnaire, Gallup has found that people with best friends at work are also more engaged in their work. Greater employee engagement, in turn, has been found to lead to greater profitability, customer engagement, and employee retention. Where do social interactions figure in here? Gallup’s research did not focus on social interactions but I think it is reasonable to think that social interactions at workplace are an important precursor to having a best friend at work.

Companies using social networking tools internally

Perhaps it is due to the potential of social interaction to lead to favorable business outcomes that some companies have adopted Facebook or tools like it for internal use. Serena Software, a company of about 800 employees with average age close to 50, adopted Facebook to improve the quality of workplace interaction (see related article). According to the company, the Facebook initiative has yielded tactical and strategic benefits. With over 95% penetration of Facebook within the company, the company’s culture has changed. The social networking tool has led to relationships that would not have existed otherwise.

A Canadian manufacturer of construction goods, Canam Group, decided to use Facebook for various aspects of its 2008 leadership conference (see related article). About 200 attendees, who were 50 years old on average, were offered the use of Facebook to create and share their profiles, register for the conference, and take part in the opening ceremony, elections, quizzes, and photo contests. The use of Facebook was a huge success, with a 99% participation rate. After the conference, Canam Group decided to set up a Facebook group that is available to its employees and retirees to create a more collaborative culture within the company.

IBM has set up a Facebook-like social networking tool, called Beehive, to facilitate personal and professional connections within the company. Like Facebook, Beehive provides an employee who is joining the network a profile page. On this page, employees can use the status message field and the ‘About Me’ section to update others about where they are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking. Users can also post photos, create lists to share their thoughts, and organize events. Beehive has been reported to facilitate connections at a social or human level between people working remotely. It has also led to opportunities for collaboration that would not have arisen in the absence of information about who else share’s one’s interest and expertise.

Summary

The use of social networking tools internally can add value by facilitating social interactions. Social networking tools can facilitate cultural change and friendships within your organization. They can help your employees discover who shares their interests and expertise and open up opportunities for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Distributed workers who have been assigned to a common project can use such tools to learn more about each other and break the ice. If you are not comfortable using Facebook internally because of its public nature, alternatives that can be deployed within your firewall (e.g., Lotus Connection, Socialtext) are available. A new tool, called as Convofy, will also be available as an alternative in the near future.

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Is Video Conferencing a Good Substitute for Face-to-face Meetings?

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:53:21 +0000

When air travel to and from several European cities was curtailed due to volcanic ash, people adopted Skype and other video conferencing tools in lieu of travel. Unlike email or telephone, video conferencing is thought to be like face-to-face communication but only somewhat leaner because one is not in the same place as the person one is communicating with. In other words, video conferencing is thought to vary in degree rather than in nature.

Research on video conferencing, however, paints a different picture. It argues that video-conferencing gives rise to a different kind of information processing than what takes place during face-to-face meetings. A case in point is a study by Carlos Ferran and Stephanie Watts, published in September 2008 in Management Science.

According to the researchers, communicators using video conferencing face a higher cognitive load than face-to-face communicators because of a variety of challenges, including those of identifying who is speaking, detecting movement, coordinating eye-contact, turn-taking, and conversation pacing. Video conferencing also consumes greater cognitive attention due to heightened self-awareness. Faced with a higher cognitive load, users of video conferencing may economize when evaluating the information presented the speaker. They may economize by using heuristics, such as how likeable they perceive the speaker to be, rather than the quality of the arguments presented by the speaker when judging whether or not they will adopt or use the information presented by the speaker. On the other hand, in face-to-face meetings, the communication medium does not impose as much cognitive burden, thereby leaving the receiver of any communication with adequate cognitive resources to focus on the quality of information while making judgment about whether or not it will be adopted and used.

Ferran and Watts report results from a field study in which they found support for their model of how video conferencing may differ from face-to-face communication. In a study of medical professionals, they found that participants attending a seminar via video conference were more influenced by the speaker’s likeability than by the quality of the speaker’s arguments, whereas the opposite pattern was true for participants who attended in person. The likeability of a person was based on the extent to what that person was perceived as charismatic, appealing, interesting, and friendly. The researchers also confirmed that differences in cognitive load explained these effects. Based on these findings, the authors argued that video conferencing does not simply approach face-to-face interaction — it changes what we attend to. Essentially, we end up attending more to peripheral cues in the form of a person’s likeability than to systematic or rigorous cues to judge the information we are receiving from that person via video conferencing. A word of caution should be noted about Ferran and Watts’ findngs: they apply to the use of video conferencing in seminar-like settings where participants have not had prior interaction with the presenter.

What do the results from Ferran and Watts mean for a leader? When the leader is having a tough time convincing others about the merits of a proposal but is a likeable person, s/he should use video-conferencing rather than a face-to-face meeting to make her/his case. A leader may also recruit a likeable person to present the proposal. Or, if a virtual team is using video-conferencing and the leader would like participants to be more systematic in their processing, the leader should minimize the cognitive burden of using video conferencing. This can be done by giving the users enough training on the use of video conferencing. Moreover, the users should do a dry run with each other so that they become more familiar with each other’s turn-taking pauses, pacing gestures, and other ways of regulating the communication.

Another thing a virtual team leader who can do to increase the attention to logical aspects of the information being presented is to make it easy for participants to focus on logical aspects. Having another window (in addition to the one showing a video of the presenter) that allows users to see a running slide presentation, with arguments laid out very clearly, might be helpful.

In summary, the evidence presented by Ferran and Watts suggests that video conferencing may not be comparable to face-to-face meetings because it changes the nature of information processing by its users. In that sense, it does not substitute for face-to-face meetings. Consequently, simply thinking that video conferencing can be made to approach face-to-face meetings by improving the picture quality may not suffice. One needs to focus on reducing the cognitive burden imposed by video conferencing in order to make it approach face-to-face meetings.

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Facebook & Twitter Talk Not Empathy-Evoking

Surinder Kahai — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:49:08 +0000

Some months back, Betsy had blogged about a New York Times article by Clive Thompson on how technologies such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter lead to ambient awareness. She wrote: “These technologies make it convenient to quickly and easily give or get updates with a number of other people. Although each individual message might have little meaning as a stand-alone, researchers have found that reading frequent updates about a friend will, over time, give an observer a fairly sophisticated understanding of that friend and lead to the development of an empathic relationship“.

A recent article in Wall Street Journal offers a counter viewpoint. The author of the article, Julia Angwin, initially thought that the small talk enabled by Facebook and Twitter was replacing the need to ask someone “How are you?” Since small talk is an important part of building relationships that enable people to work and play together, she sought out to test whether digital small talk was as effective as real talk. She decided to investigate whether the updates she was getting via Facebook or Twitter were authentic, i.e., whether they reflected the true states of the individuals behind them.

By calling up her mom and a couple of friends, Julia found out that the daily digital updates did not actually give a true picture of these individuals. For instance, her mom’s garden was doing fine — just like she had mentioned in her tweets — but she was really upset about a friend’s illness — something that she had not tweeted about. The digital updates were not deceitful but, according to Julia, they were creating “a cocoon of information that may not paint a full picture of the truth.” She finds the daily digital feeds as reassuring but the next time she meets someone, she plans to ask “How are you, really?”

Which viewpoint do you agree with? Does Facebook and Twitter talk evoke empathy? What has been your experience? I invite you to share your thoughts below.

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Communication is Key in Virtual Work

Rebecca Jestice — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:21:16 +0000

Surinder is my advisor and mentor in the doctoral program at Binghamton University. We have written several conference papers and collaborated on other projects together with Betsy and Professor Rui Huang at the university. Very often the two of us, or all of us, have worked together while geographically far apart. We have used tools like Google docs, Google groups, Yugma, Skype, e-mail and Team Viewer to communicate and collaborate. This has worked quite well and is often more convenient than trying to meet face-to-face, even if we are all in town. These days, however, I am working on my dissertation and we have found it different from working on other projects virtually, with its own challenges.

I am in the developmental stage of my dissertation proposal; I’m developing my research model, hypotheses, and methods for completing the dissertation. This is very time consuming and requires a lot of reading, reflection and creativity. Surinder and I have been connecting over Skype to discuss ideas about how to proceed and the direction my dissertation should take. These discussions help me formulate my thoughts more clearly for the next round of revisions. After our meeting last week, Surinder asked me to keep him updated on my thoughts as I went about writing the next draft. What happened, however, is that I didn’t speak with Surinder again or share any thoughts with him until I sent him the next draft, which sadly was also incomplete. It was incomplete because working alone without sharing my thoughts and bouncing ideas off Surinder slowed me down considerably and I was unable to finish before the deadline.

Why didn’t I discuss things with Surinder as I thought about them? Well, because we didn’t have any set meeting times during those days and we didn’t see each other face-to-face; I wasn’t sure when he might be available. Often, my ideas seemed so trivial that I didn’t want to disturb him with something that seemed, at the time, frivolous. So I found myself spinning my wheels, trying to get my ideas solidified and down on paper before interrupting him at home or on Skype. Had he been across the hall in his office, I probably would have dropped by to bounce some ideas around rather than continue spinning on my own. We had another meeting over Skype recently which quickly cleared up a lot of my troubles in further developing my ideas and put me back on track for writing my proposal.

The lesson we learned from this experience is that, for some projects or project phases, frequent, set meeting times are very important for continuing progress when working virtually – especially in a situation that requires a lot of creative energy and when one person is teaching or mentoring others for the project. Even if instructed to contact one another when something comes up, the tendency will be to not bother the person or try to save up all the ideas for one phone call or email that never seems to happen. It might be a bit more time consuming in the beginning to set up regular check-in meetings, but I’ve learned from this experience that it is, in the long run, the most efficient way to complete intensive, creative projects while working virtually.

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Focusing on the Positive for Positive Team Outcomes

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:30:33 +0000

The other day I found a link to a book review on Twitter. The book is called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. It provides summaries of research about persuasion and how to be successfully persuasive. One study in particular had me thinking about an approach to change and innovation that I am very interested in. The summarized study concluded that ads that quoted negative behavior en masse reinforced the negative behavior in individuals. In the study, visitors to a national park were exposed to two different signs. The first sign stated that large amounts of petrified forest had been previously taken away and to please not remove any pieces. The second sign simply said that visitors should not remove pieces of the forest. The first sign tripled the amount of theft because it portrayed the theft as a common occurrence. The same effect was realized when an ad targeting women voters mentioned the number of women who didn’t vote previously. The attention given to the negative behavior reinforces that it is socially acceptable and increases the occurrence of the behavior.

I found this to be an interesting insight for leaders to think about, especially when faced with the need to make a team intervention, work with a continually evolving team, or introduce change into a team. I was reminded of an approach to change called Appreciative Inquiry. In the simplest of terms, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approaches change from a positive standpoint. Rather than looking for what is not working, AI encourages those involved to think about what is working and how to intensify that effect. The AI approach seeks to bring out the best in people and their organizations. (For more in-depth information about AI, see the Appreciative Inquiry Commons.) Perhaps an AI approach to virtual team leadership could help minimize negative behaviors in a team that is having or facing difficulty by focusing on positive interactions and outcomes and reinforcing them, rather than pointing out trends of negative behaviors. This may be an especially useful method in virtual teams in which people don’t know each other well or depend heavily on technology that can obfuscate meaning of complex messages (such as using email to send sensitive or ambiguous information). Basing interaction in an AI framework for tasks such as an after action review may relieve some defensive reactions in team members when something doesn’t go according to plan and strengthen team unity through concentrating on what went right.

I’d love to know if anyone has experience using AI in teams or organizations and lessons learned from the experience.

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Social Presence and Team Satisfaction

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:52:23 +0000

Surinder and I are currently conducting research on the use of online media such as virtual worlds for education and training. In my readings I came across an interesting article about the perceptions of social presence, or the feeling of being with others in an online environment, and perceived learning and satisfaction in an online course. In this study, researchers measured student perceptions of social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction with an online course and found significant correlations. Students who reported higher perceived social presence also perceived that they learned more than those who perceived lower levels of social presence. Students with higher perceived social presence were also more satisfied with their instructor overall. The limitations of the research and the paper have to be considered when making inferences from these results, such as the fact that we can’t infer causation from correlations, and the fact that all of the data used was perceptual and self-reported by the students. However, I still found the results quite interesting because the researchers looked not only at overall levels of perceived social presence and perceived learning, but also at each of these things based on the learning activity (e.g. discussions, team projects, lectures, written assignments). As might be expected, the correlation between social presence and perceived learning was highest among group oriented activities such as discussion and group projects, but statistically significant correlations were found for all activities, including lectures, notes and readings. It seems to imply that social presence has an impact on the students’ perceived outcomes of the course even for activities that are completed individually.

What might this mean for virtual teams and virtual team leaders? I am careful to make too large a leap from this research to best practices for virtual teams, however, a virtual team working under a leader, may have similar outcomes. That would mean that perceived social presence could have a large impact on team outcomes like satisfaction or perceived learning, especially in situations where the team is trying to understand new concepts or project objectives. This seems to have been a theme throughout some conversations Surinder and I have had with people who use virtual worlds regularly to conduct team meetings. Although the teams might encounter technological issues with using and running a virtual world, many users cite the sense of presence and being with others as one of the benefits of using the virtual world to conduct the majority of team meetings as opposed to other tools available such as a team wiki, instant messaging, or email. It is not realistic at this point for all virtual teams to use virtual worlds all the time, but it might be more important than originally conceived for virtual team leaders to engender a sense of social presence amongst distant team members regardless of the task type. One way that this can be done is to ensure that there is some sort of shared object that team members are working on together. A shared work space can add to social presence as well, such as shared documents stored on a shared group website from which team members can work.

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Lessons in Leadership and Other Interesting Items

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:43:01 +0000

With the semester ending soon, things are awfully busy at the university. It’s been challenging to find time to sit down, reflect, and write new posts. Rather than not post anything, I thought I will share some of the interesting articles I read recently.

Today’s New York Times had a couple of articles that provide good lessons in leadership. One of the articles reproduces an interview with Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney. According to Mr. Iger, optimism is an important part of leadership. In another article, Gregory Spierkel, the CEO of Ingram Micro, shared lessons that have helped him rise during his career. I thought the most notable was the following: “be willing to take an assignment that is less glamorous than you would like, and … make something out of it. You need to surprise your boss or the people around you. Either turn a project around faster or leave it in better shape than it was. People will trust you and give you more responsibility and more interesting work.”

The Scientific American had an interesting coverage of research by Stanford scientists who found that humans have an innate intent to synchronize and cooperate with others. Interestingly, if we are made to engage in collective movement with others (such as march around campus in sync with others or sing the national anthem in unison), we feel more connected to them and trust them more. We may even be willing to incur direct costs to cooperate with others. I thought this this finding has tremendous implications for how we make members of virtual teams collaborate. For instance, as part of team building activities, members of a virtual team could be made to carry out a synchronized action (e.g., swim in unison) in a virtual world. According to the article, such an activity would promote pro-social behavior and trust. Team members would sacrifice self-interest for the good of the group.

Another Scientific American article discussed the use of virtual worlds by therapists to address real problems. For instance, virtual environments have been used to treat troubled teens by letting them role-play and see the impact of their behavior from another person’s point of view. I thought the article provided a good example of the Proteus effect, whereby seeing one’s behavior in a virtual world affects one’s attitudes and, hence, subsequent behavior in the real-world. Virtual world researchers at Stanford have provided us with numerous examples of this from their research (see our past digest where we have covered this).

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Can Virtual Teams Afford the Hardware for Their Software?

Rebecca Jestice — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:48:55 +0000

The Washington Post recently featured an article about how the new system upgrades for Microsoft and Apple (due out likely towards the end of the year in time for the holidays) might impact those in the market for new computers. Although the article is directed at individual consumers performing “typical” tasks, businesses and those working on virtual teams might want to pay special attention to the coming upgrades and their implications. Unfortunately, the article does not discuss any recent developments with Linux distributions, but for those of us using Windows or Mac OS, here is what we can expect:

Windows is upgrading the much-maligned Vista to Windows 7. The upgrade for current Vista users should be smooth, but if you are still clinging to XP, be prepared for a multi-step, complicated process to convert to Windows 7. Mac is updating OS X Leopard to OS X Snow Leopard.
Although neither company has released anything official, it can be expected that each system will require a minimum of 1 gigabyte of RAM to run.
The new systems will take some tasks previously performed by the main processor and offload them to the graphics chip–so a good graphics chip will be important.
Lastly, it might be difficult to get by with a single core processor unless you are performing very light tasks. Snow Leopard is also rumored to be Intel Mac compatible only.

What does this mean for virtual teams? While a system upgrade itself may be a good thing, for teams using resource intensive software for collaboration this could mean the need to invest in new and better hardware to keep up with the new operating systems plus the collaboration software already in use. One example is users of virtual worlds, which also often require a large amount of CPU usage, good graphics chips, and a lot of RAM to work effectively. We have learned that having appropriate hardware to run programs like virtual worlds is a major obstacle for those who use them regularly to collaborate.

The bottom line is that if virtual teams are looking to upgrade to the new operating systems quickly, they may also have to budget for some hardware upgrades to keep things running smoothly. On the other hand, those already in the market to buy some new hardware might want to postpone their purchases until the release of the new operating systems.

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