E-Collaboration Media Use and Diversity Perceptions: An Evolutionary Perspective of Virtual Organizations

Introduction

E-collaboration plays a critical role in organizations. Media that support e-collaboration enable modern business-to-business commerce, electronic commerce, and supply chain management (Kock, 2005; Madlberger, 2009). E-collaboration media facilitate the formation of strategic partnerships (Choe, 2008) and global integration (Heidecke & Back, 2009) to competitively carry-out complex tasks (Reinig, Briggs, & de Vreede, 2009). Organizations that utilize e-collaboration can save time, money, and manpower (Ko, Olfman, & Choi, 2009).

One type of organization that exclusively relies on e-collaboration to function is a virtual organization. A virtual organization refers to a dynamic, flexible community composed of temporally and spatially dispersed individuals and resources (Burkhard & Horan, 2006; Orman, 2009). Virtual organizations allow strategic partnerships among a diverse group of individuals to exploit complementary knowledge and capabilities as well as solve complex projects that span boundaries (Choe, 2008). People use e-collaboration media to coordinate work and exchange information. E-collaboration media can include a variety of technologies such as computer-mediated communication (e.g., group-support systems and email), videoconferencing suites, and teleconferencing suites (Kock, 2005). The use of e-collaboration media in a virtual organization is expected to enhance interaction among participants, thus minimizing the perception of temporal and spatial dispersion. Research has examined a wide variety of virtual organizations, ranging from virtual teams that are formed for a specific purpose and disbanded as quickly as they were formed (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999), to virtual enterprises that connect organizations, teams, and other pre-existing entities (Shachaf, 2008)

Although virtual organizations may have many advantages in terms of costs, creativity, and resource utilization, they often encounter problems that may cause them to fail, which discourages organizations from adopting virtual structures (Orman, 2009). For example, research has suggested that virtual organizations have difficulty sustaining longevity and following a long-term strategy (Orman, 2009). Little research has examined how diversity in virtual organizations influences this longevity and causes the organization to evolve. Moreover, minimal guidance is available to help organizations leverage diversity over time by employing e-collaboration media with different characteristics. Our objectives in this paper are focused on addressing these limitations. First, we discuss the role of diversity in virtual organizations. Our second objective is to highlight the role of e-collaboration media on virtual organization evolution, particularly with respect to diversity. Our third objective is to offer propositions that will guide researchers who work at the intersection of virtual organization evolution, diversity, and e-collaboration media. Finally, we illustrate how our theoretical framework is relevant for virtual organizations by providing an application of our framework to a hypothetical organization.