Managing virtual teams: A review of current empirical research

As employees find themselves in geographically separated teams, the loss of face-to-face interaction has led to the development of new monitoring technologies that provide availability information for enhancing collaboration. Drawing on diverse literatures in electronic performance monitoring, computer supported cooperative work, privacy, and fairness, a comprehensive theoretical model of monitoring acceptance was developed to examine the effects of being monitored for availability. In the first study, over 600 employees from a large number of organizations responded to one of a variety of monitoring system characteristics. Although the model found strong support overall, results suggest that technical solutions, such as manipulating the characteristics of the awareness system, are not sufficient to ensure fairness and privacy. A second, focus group study, adds support for the theoretical model and provides an explanation for these quantitative results concerning system characteristics. Specifically, the qualitative evidence suggests that these systems can invade employees' psychological barriers - and thus manipulating the technology will only have small effects on fairness and privacy because the technology has already crossed the line from benign to invasive. The paper concludes by presenting theoretical and practical implications for the consideration of psychological boundaries in the design and use of ubiquitous monitoring and communication technologies. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Where is the line between benign and invasive? An examination of psychological barriers to the acceptance of awareness monitoring systems

The notions that information seeking is not always a solitary activity and that people working in collaboration for information intensive tasks should be studied and supported have become more prevalent in recent years. Several new research questions, methodologies, and systems have emerged around these notions that may prove to be useful beyond the field of collaborative information seeking CIS, with relevance to the broader area of information seeking and behavior. This article provides an overview of such key research work from a variety of domains, including library and information science, computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval. It starts with explanations of collaboration and how CIS fits in different contexts, emphasizing the interactive, intentional, and mutually beneficial nature of CIS activities. Relations to similar and related fields such as collaborative information retrieval, collaborative information behavior, and collaborative filtering are also clarified. Next, the article presents a synthesis of various frameworks and models that exist in the field today, along with a new synthesis of 12 different dimensions of group activities. A discussion on issues and approaches relating to evaluating various parameters in CIS follows. Finally, a list of known issues and challenges is presented to provide an overview of research opportunities in this field.

Collaborative information seeking

Personality as a moderator of monitoring acceptance

Support for explicit collaboration in information-seeking activities is increasingly recognized as a desideratum for search systems. Several tools have emerged recently that help groups of people with the same information-seeking goals to work together. Many issues for these collaborative information-seeking (CIS) environments remain understudied. The authors identified awareness as one of these issues in CIS, and they presented a user study that involved 42 pairs of participants, who worked in collaboration over 2 sessions with 3 instances of the authors' CIS system for exploratory search. They showed that while having awareness of personal actions and history is important for exploratory search tasks spanning multiple sessions, support for group awareness is even more significant for effective collaboration. In addition, they showed that support for such group awareness can be provided without compromising usability or introducing additional load on the users. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/asi.21379

Awareness in collaborative information seeking

Over the last decade, the issue of awareness has received increasing attention from practitioners in academia and industry. This applies to researchers from various horizons, and in particular from the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and the World Wide Web (WWW) communities. Nevertheless, awareness has remained a somewhat fuzzy concept, for which there exists no single, unequivocal definition. True, awareness is often meant as awareness of other people, and refers to the ability to maintain some knowledge about the situation and activities of others. There is also a tacit agreement that maintaining this knowledge should not require much effort or, in other words, that awareness should happen as ‘‘naturally’’ as possible. Supporting technology should be designed with this aim, which explains why human–computer interaction issues are of prime concern. Research has exhibited a wide spectrum of situations, in the context of which ‘‘awareness’’ can take very different meanings. Rather than to speak about awareness as such, it is therefore more appropriate to speak about particular types of awareness. For instance, group awareness can be defined as the ability that peers may have to stay in touch and to keep track of each others activities. The information that group members maintain about each other may not be very consequent, nor very precise. Having only a general idea of what is happening, or merely that something is happening, is often already very valuable. Let us be clear about it: the realization of group awareness may not require any technology support at all. When people share the same room, they naturally produce and interpret a constant flow of subtle cues with this aim. Glancing at someone may be enough to decide whether it is appropriate or not to start a conversation. On the other hand, when the members of a group are scattered across space and time, technology may offer surrogates to this natural process}media spaces are an example for such technology. Obviously, groups formed in the context of the workplace greatly benefit from increased awareness. Communication and collaboration are easier, cooperation is smoother and, as a result, work processes are more efficient.

http://www.webcollab.com/alee/papers/intro-ijhcs02.pdf

Olivier Liechti

Papers

Editorial: awareness and the WWW