Collaborative manufacturing, a growing competitive structure for manufacturing companies and government agencies, is based on flexible design and production processes, with multiple companies pooling strengths on a product-by-product basis to create distributed collaborative corporations. This experimental research uses a sociotechnical theory as a framework to explore differences in engineering design team decision making as a function of various media of communication. Results indicate that design teams communicating via an electronic medium perceive an increase in mental workload and interact less frequently, but for a greater total amount of time. No evidence was found to suggest that face-to-face teams spend a greater proportion of their time discussing design issues or alternatives than do their dispersed counterparts. Realizing that critical decisions throughout design have a tremendous effect on cost, time to production, and overall quality, the study's results lead to broad implications and suggestions for the management of distributed design teams.

Collaborative manufacturing is aimed to increase the flexibility of design and production processes through multiple organizations pooling strengths on a product‐by‐product basis to create distributed collaborative corporations. These collaborations involve multidisciplinary, geographically dispersed teams of engineers who often communicate only through voice, video, or computer‐mediated interfaces. Utilizing sociotechnical theory as a framework, this article reviews multiple sources of literature on collaboration and interprets them in light of the collaborative engineering design process. A conceptual model of distributed engineering collaboration based on a sociotechnical theory framework is proposed to understand how technology changes both the social interaction and the technical design process. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The movement toward distributed collaborative work groups or virtual teams by organizations has initiated a myriad of questions specific to human factors research. Distributed team members, linked through technological interfaces, may vary in location, discipline, company loyalties, and culture. While virtual teams are necessary in this environment of time compression, distributed resources, increasing dependence on knowledge-based input, and the integration of information and telecommunication technologies, there is an increasing need to understand factors influencing distributed work group performance. Communication research has demonstrated that as communication signals are narrowed by medium restraints, the communication process changes and group members adopt new communication strategies. This study hypothesized that a group's mental workload would increase as the communication bandwidth was constrained. Results show that audio and video groups did not perceive significantly different overall workloads; however, both exceeded that of face-to-face groups.