The Effects of Synchronous Collaborative Technologies on Decision Making: A Study of Virtual Teams

Technological advances have an ever-increasing impact on our society. Globalization and the changing structures of organizations have created virtual work groups that are distributed across space (different sites) and time. Collaboration among workers is vital to both ongoing organizational activities and project-based activities. Communication is often seen as the most important factor contributing to the success of individuals, project teams, and organizational growth. Improved connectivity together with the increase in groups and teams has resulted in increased interest in extending the usefulness of IT at the individual level to support the issues faced by dispersed teams. This study compares the performance of sixty-four virtual teams utilizing four different collaborative technologies; text-only, audioonly, text-video and audio-video. While the results of the study found no significant difference between the quality of the decisions for teams using text-only versus audio-only communication, the addition of video to audioonly communication resulted in a significant improvement in the quality of teams’ strategic decisions. This chapter appears in the book, Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management, Volume 3, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING