ABSTRACT

Teams have increasingly turned to computer-mediated communication (CMC) to work when team members cannot all be in the same physical space at the same time, leading to the need to better understand what influences group performance in these settings. We know that team member intelligence and personality affect team performance when teams work face-to-face, but their effects are not yet clear when teams use text-based CMC, which has different characteristics than face-to-face communication. We conducted a laboratory study of 61 teams working on a decision-making task using text-based CMC. We found that team mean extraversion had a large negative effect, and team mean neuroticism had a medium-sized negative effect on team performance. Team mean intelligence had no effect. We recommend that managers consider the effects of extraversion when selecting team members and focus on selecting more introverted team members if the team is likely to extensively use text-based CMC. Likewise, managers should consider extraversion when designing teamwork processes for virtual teams; if a team has many members who are high in extraversion, the team should use text-based CMC sparingly. We also recommend that researchers use extraversion as a control factor in future research studying text-based CMC because extraversion has a large effect on team outcomes and, left uncontrolled, could increase unexplained error variance and overshadow the focus of the research study.

摘要

当团队成员不能同时在同一个物理空间中时，团队越来越多地转向计算机介导的通信 (CMC) 工作，这导致需要更好地了解在这些环境中影响团队绩效的因素。我们知道，当团队面对面工作时，团队成员的智力和个性会影响团队绩效，但当团队使用基于文本的 CMC 时，它们的影响尚不清楚，这与面对面交流具有不同的特征。我们使用基于文本的 CMC 对 61 个从事决策任务的团队进行了实验室研究。我们发现团队平均外向性有很大的负面影响，团队平均神经质有中等负面影响对团队绩效的影响。团队平均情报没有影响。我们建议经理在选择团队成员时考虑外向性的影响，如果团队可能广泛使用基于文本的 CMC，则重点选择更内向的团队成员。同样，管理人员在为虚拟团队设计团队合作流程时应考虑外向性；如果一个团队有很多外向性高的成员，团队应该谨慎使用基于文本的 CMC。我们还建议研究人员在未来研究基于文本的 CMC 的研究中使用外向性作为控制因素，因为外向性对团队成果有很大的影响，如果不加以控制，可能会增加无法解释的错误方差并掩盖研究的重点。