The degree of similarity between a given communication medium and the face-to-face medium determines the naturalness of the media and the cognitive effort needed to use the media for communications.
Published in Chapter:
Virtual Teams Adapt to Simple E-Collaboration Technologies
Dorrie DeLuca (University of Delaware, USA), Susan Gasson (Drexel University, USA), and Ned Kock (Texas A&M International University, USA)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-000-4.ch106
Abstract
The knowledge that virtual process improvement teams have been successful (DeLuca, Gasson, & Kock, 2006; Kock & DeLuca, 2006; DeLuca & Valacich, 2006; Kock, 2006) and lessons learned from those teams may be what is needed to provide confidence to organizations that virtual process improvement efforts would come to fruition. To manage such initiatives effectively, it is important to understand how these virtual teams overcame the difficulties of e-collaboration. Existing theories of information processing in organizations do not scale well to the complex forms of knowledge integration required at the boundary between the diverse teams found in virtual organizations. Thus, we based our investigation on a new theory of communication behavior, compensatory adaptation theory (CAT) (Kock, 2005b) and the relationships suggested by it, explained in the next section. We also operationalize a key construct, compensatory adaptations and present the adaptations made by participants in the study (DeLuca et al., 2006).