0000000000004027
AUTHOR
Jennifer L. Gibbs
Investigating the impacts of team type and design on virtual team processes
While much is known about virtual team processes and outcomes, the literature relies on a variety of team configurations and types (including student versus organizational samples, short-term versus long-term teams, functional versus project-based teams, and teams with various task types) yet has not systematically examined how these differences impact team processes. This is important because much of the virtual teams research has been based on student samples, which are easier to access and control, with the implicit assumption that the findings from student samples will generalize to organizational virtual teams. This manuscript reviews the last 15 years of research on virtual teams and …
Exploring the discursive construction of subgroups in global virtual teams
The global teams literature has increasingly documented challenges due to demographic faultlines. While this literature tends to assume that faultlines are fixed and produce negative outcomes for teams, organizational communication scholars have long regarded team processes as dynamic and fluid. Drawing on a CCO perspective, we offer a re-conceptualization of subgroups as dynamic and discursively constructed. This study draws on an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of two global virtual teams to examine the discursive construction of subgroups and the role they play in team dynamics. Through a multi-method analysis of a corpus of 839 emails and 16 interviews with members of two global project…
Rethinking virtuality in a digital media age
Scholars have studied virtuality in teams and organizations for over two decades. The term “virtual” is of- ten used loosely and imprecisely, and theoretical debates have flourished over what differentiates virtual from non-virtual teams. In these debates, scholarship has not explicitly considered the significant ways in which the technological landscape has changed over this time. While the virtual is often treated as a separate space from “real”, physical or face-to-face interaction, the increasing technological saturation of our lives has resulted in a blurring of online and offline worlds such that these distinctions may no longer hold up. I will explore whether the term “virtuality” st…