Teamwork, time, trust and information

• Authors: Patricia M Alexander
• Venue: SAICSIT '02 Proceedings of the 2002 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology
• Year: 2002

This paper discusses the concepts of time, trust and information in relationship to virtual teams (also known as dispersed collaborative teams). Students were allowed to do their collaborative work in various settings including working as a virtual team communicating entirely via e-mail. A pluralist research approach was adopted in which questionnaires were used to collect quantitative data and recordings were made of both e-mail and f-to-f discussions and these all provided data to be interpreted. Thus, an interpretive research strategy was used. Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action was used in the in-depth analysis of the discourse that took place in order to compare the type of collaboration that occurred in the different types of team. It is important to note that the action research cannot be considered to have 'been successful' but lessons were nevertheless learned. A relationship was noted between the amount and kind of information that can be shared, the time taken to share this information and the nature of the relationships within the teams. Although the action research was carried out in an educational setting, and hence was focussed on collaborative learning, it has relevance in virtual organisations of all types.