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TopA Typical E-Collaboration Study Scenario
Let us assume that a researcher introduced an e-collaboration technology into an organization with the goal of facilitating the work of business process improvement teams (Kock, 2005). These are teams that carry out business process redesign projects – they select, analyze and redesign business processes (Kock, 2006).
All teams studied by the researcher use the e-collaboration technology. No controls on how much the teams use the technology are applied by the researcher, characterizing the investigation as a field study with quasi-experimental elements (Shadish et al., 2002). The researcher is interested in the possible effect that the use of the e-collaboration technology has on team performance measures, such as the return on investment of a business process redesign project.
In this scenario, the researcher can measure the degree to which the e-collaboration technology is used, or the degree to which specific features of the e-collaboration technology are used. Either way, the researcher will have one or more variables for which there will be different values for different teams. These values will reflect different degrees of use of the e-collaboration technology as a whole, or of specific features of the technology.
The researcher can next collect team performance measures and build one or more models to be analyzed with WarpPLS (Kock, 2010; 2011; 2011b). A simple model would have two latent variables, one measuring e-collaboration technology use and the other measuring team performance, with e-collaboration technology use pointing at team performance.