Enhancing Information Exchange/Sharing in Virtual Teams: A Study on the Efficacy of Techniques

The benefits of information sharing on a team’s performance have been well documented. Information sharing helps individual members in a team overcome their individual biases thereby leading to better decisions. Despite such perceived advantages, its still a challenge to get team members to share information with one another, especially the tacit part and even more so in the case of virtual teams. In this study, we posit that one of the primary reasons for the lack of information exchange /sharing might be the difficulty of a team member in eliciting their tacit knowledge/information itself-in most cases referring to the unique component of information. This study attempts to address this issue by examining the efficacy of two cognitive based techniques: Delphi and RepGrid in eliciting such unique information. Our preliminary results indicate that RepGrid is a better technique for information elicitation especially when dealing with complex tasks and could permit more information exchange/sharing than the Delphi when used in a virtual team context.