Identifying critical factors impacting virtual work group performance

Abstract

Virtual teams are an increasingly frequent response to the new competitive environment. Technological advances and global competition have moved virtual teaming from the "good idea I' stage to a critical strategy for many organizations. Our understanding of critical factors relative to virtual teams is limited us very few studies have been completed. Virtual teams are characterized as having high social complexity. Jointly optimizing the social and the technical organizational subsystems has been demonstrated by sociotechnical theory to improve overall performance. Consequently, technical system interventions may improve the virtual team's ability to leverage its social system complexity. This paper explores a sociotechnical upproach to investigating technical system interventions to enhance virtual team performance.

The Humanistic Side of Engineering: Considering Social Science and Humanities Dimensions of Engineering in Education and Research

“…Research comparing professional engineers to engineering students found that practiced professionals organized themselves as a group much more effectively than did the students (Smith & Leong, 1998). Professional engineers also communicated with each other throughout the process to ''stay on the same page,'' understand their failures, resolve disagreements and challenges, and reflect on their process (Hacker & Kleiner, 1996;Harvey & Koubek, 1998;Smith & Leong, 1998;Stempfle & Badke-Schaub, 2002). All of which takes some social skill.…”

“…Better solutions arise when diverse perspectives contribute to the creation of artifacts. Those who study collaboration and group work of engineering teams highlight how important interpersonal and social dynamics are to the process (Hacker & Kleiner, 1996;Hammond, Koubek, & Harvey, 2001;Stempfle & BadkeSchaub, 2002) and that the form of communication (inperson or virtually) within a design group matters (Harvey & Koubek, 1998). Stempfle and Badke-Schaub (2002) found that approximately 1/3 of the communication within a group designing collaboratively was aimed at structuring the group's process.…”

“…In addition to the benefits of having multiple people with diverse perspectives working toward a solution, research highlights how important interpersonal and social dynamics are to engineering (Hacker & Kleiner, 1996;Hammond et al, 2001;Stempfle & Badke-Schaub, 2002) and that engineers' communication, in varying forms (Harvey & Koubek, 1998), and organization are important for effective engineering (Smith & Leong, 1998). Professional engineers communicate with each other throughout the process to ''stay on the same page,'' understand their failures, resolve disagreements and challenges, and reflect on their process (Smith & Leong, 1998;Stempfle & Badke-Schaub, 2002).…”

Virtual Work Group Collaboration in a Manufacturing Process

“…Evaluating the collaborative tools depends on many factors (Brown et al, 2007), where previous research works have been discussed the need to consider all different aspects that impacts the virtual teams performance (Hacker & Kleiner 1996;Wallace 1997;Nakayama & D´ávila, 2003). For our case and due the nature characteristics and needs of the virtual teams, the manufacturing process itself, the project's objectives, the current capabilities, and the intention to measure all steps in the process in order to look for the continuous process improvement.…”

“…In this context, virtual teams require the use of information technology (IT) to exist, little is known about how the technology can be configured to optimize work group performance (Hacker & Kleiner, 1996). Although some of these aspects and concerns have been discussed before, in previous research works, more and diverse cases are need to support, design and establish a framework for best practices and lessons learned, that if the case, serve as a baseline to look for models, explore and develop standards based in a common standard-based foundation (Tomek, 2003), that in consequence will address common efforts of researches, developers, and practitioners dedicated to all different and diverse aspects of collaboration.…”