Date of Award
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Psychology
Committee Chair
Sandra Carpenter
Committee Member
Jeffrey Neuschatz
Committee Member
Jodi Price
Subject(s)
Virtual work teams, Organizational change, Teams in the workplace
Abstract
Technological advancements have provided organizations the ability to operate on a national and international scale. These businesses may utilize virtual teams to bring employees together from around the country or world to work together to complete an assignment. Virtual teams consist of individuals with different cultures, goals, and styles of interaction who work across time, space, or organizational boundaries via communication technology. By improving the quality of communication between geographically dispersed team members, teams may experience improved productivity and decreased timescales for completing projects. The objective of this study was to investigate how interactions between team members prior to a virtual (i.e., computer-mediated) task impact the overall performance, confidence, and cohesiveness of virtual teams. By manipulating the types of interactions teams have prior to a virtual task, this experiment could identify techniques to increase team cohesiveness as well as enhance communication between team members operating in a virtual environment. Due to the inability to aggregate to the team level, analyses for several of the proposed hypotheses could not be conducted. A significant different in team cohesion scores was between teams that communicated virtually and face-to-face during the initial team meeting. Teams that met face-to-face reported significantly higher levels of collective-efficacy than teams that communicated virtually. However, no significant correlation was found between collective-efficacy and performance on the virtual task.
Recommended Citation
Frazier, Matthew J., "The influence of face-to-face interactions on virtual team performance" (2015). Theses. 166.
https://louis.uah.edu/uah-theses/166