Interaction between two teams with the same team leader and with similar size and goals moved from weekly face-to-face meetings to virtual meetings because of the temporary displacement of the team leader to a time zone six hours ahead of the rest of the team. One team focused primarily on software development and the second team on developing and testing a research instrument. The Software Tea...

OBJECTIVE I discuss cultural factors and how they may influence sociotechnical system operations. BACKGROUND Investigations of several major transportation accidents suggest that cultural factors may have played a role in the causes of the accidents. However, research has not fully addressed how cultural factors can influence sociotechnical systems. METHOD I review literature on cultural di...

There is a small but growing body of research investigating how teams form and how that affects how they perform. Much of that research focuses on teams that seek to accomplish certain tasks such as writing an article or performing a Broadway musical. There has been much less investigation of the relative performance of teams that form to directly compete against another team. In this study, we...

There are now many virtual worlds in existence, a number of which have built considerable user bases. However, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what factors underpin their continued usage and success. This study set about determining why users continue to use virtual worlds, using the example of the popular virtual world of Second Life. The study adopts continuance theory and exten...

The corporate world is changing from boardroom meetings and group gatherings to a virtual team world. Mobile employees who work from home or a remote office are becoming more common. More and more companies are adopting virtual teams because they bring many advantages to organizations and their employees. However, virtual teams carry additional complexity and increase risk of unsuccessful proje...

In this paper, the authors investigated the various factors, which can affect the performance of a turbofan engine. For this, the various subunits of a turbofan engine like inlet duct, compressor, combustion chamber, liner, turbine, exhaust nozzle etc. are investigated to find its various reliability characteristics through Markov process and supplementary variable technique (SVT). The main adv...

Motivational factors that may affect adult participation in educational activities have attracted educators’ interests and probably are one of the most discussed topics in the field of adult education. The current study seeks to investigate the students’ participation in collaborative online activities based on the interpretive framework of adult participation theories stapling to interpret mot...

We investigated coordination and communication processes in global virtual software development teams in three Indian multinational technology firms. While some of the teams in our study experienced many of the same things observed in prior research, some operated in strikingly different ways, so different, in fact, that they led us to propose a new type of organization for global virtual teams...

In this paper, a mental attribute called attitude is introduced and its importance in agent problem solving is discussed. It also presents the various properties of agents describing how the attitudes of the agents affect the behaviour of the agents. The paper also discusses how the attitudes could be described computationally in terms of various attributes. This paper formalises the team as a ...