The Effects of Communication Modality on Teamwork Processes

Since the onset of the digital age, organizations have been able to make use of teams of individuals distributed geographically to remain competitive. While strides have been made to understand the effectiveness of collocated teams, research has yet to sufficiently explore the effects of emerging technologies on team processes and effectiveness. A laboratory study, where dyads were asked to create a spreadsheet by following a set of explicit instructions (i.e., a psychomotor task), was conducted to manipulate the communication modalities most commonly used between collaborators (i.e., face-to-face vs. audio) and compare the effects of adding a shared workspace application. The experiment demonstrated that when teams worked face-to-face, they exhibited teamwork behaviors to a greater extent than when they worked via audio (i.e., monitoring and backup were greater), and team members perceived their performance to be greater when face-to-face than when using audio alone. The use of a shared workspace enhanced team processes such that distributed teams were able to exhibit teamwork behaviors (i.e., mutual performance monitoring, intra-team feedback, backup) to a greater extent than when using audio alone. Teams also committed fewer errors when using a shared workspace than when using audio alone. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.