Computer-mediated communication for intellectual teamwork: a field experiment in group writing

• Authors: Jolene Galegher;Robert E. Kraut
• Venue: CSCW '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
• Year: 1990

To work together on complex projects, people must agree on a set of shared goals, coordinate the actions of contributors, and weave the components they have created independently into a unified whole. These activities are the basic components of intellectual teamwork—people working together over substantial periods of time to create information-intensive products. Intellectual teamwork demands extensive information sharing and coordination, but these communication needs vary over time and over tasks. These projects typically involve an initial phase during which group members settle on an interpretation of the problem, define their goals and plan their work, an execution phase during which group members may work independently to carry out the various tasks associated with the project, and an integration phase during which group members must bring their individual inputs together to create a final product [Biks90; Finh90; Krau88; McGr90).These variations suggest that different communication modalities may be useful at successive stages in the life of a long-term project. A relatively static medium such as writing may be sufficient for exchanging information, but tasks that involve ambiguous goals, multiple perspectives, and information that is susceptible to multiple interpretations—characteristics of the planning and integrative phases of intellectual teamwork—are typically associated with high levels of direct, informal, face-to-face communication [Daft81; Daft87; Tush78, Tush79; Vand76]. Face-to-face interaction can support the rich communication required for integrative work, but creating the conditions to support face-to-face communication can be expensive, and sometimes, logistically impossible.Of course, other forms of communication—telephones, for instance—are available to counter these disadvantages. Telephones permit easy communication across both short and long distances, and they support naturalistic interaction embodying many of the features of Face-to-Face conversation. Nevertheless, as anyone who has ever played an extended game of “telephone tag” knows, they require the sender and the receiver to be simultaneously available. This limitation is inconsistent with current communication needs in business and science, both of which are becoming, on the one hand, more geographically and temporally distributed, and, on the other, more interconnected.