An Empirical Study of Building Social Relationships within Virtual Teams

Although virtual teams have been widely utilized nowadays, social relationships are considered highly problematic within virtual teams. This study addresses social dimensions to provide suggestions for mangers to improve the performance and satisfaction of virtual teams. We build a model derived from a comprehensive literature review and conduct an experiment to validate it through Structural Equation Modeling. The results reveal: (1) communication has a direct positive impact on relationship building, but indirect positive effects on performance and satisfaction; (2) relationship building impacts directly with strong and positive impacts on cohesion and trust, but indirectly with strong impacts on performance and satisfaction ; (3) cohesion has a direct, strong and positive impact on performance but a strong indirect impact on satisfaction; (4) trust has a positive direct impact on performance but an indirect positive impact on satisfaction; (5) performance has a strong and positive impact on satisfaction. In addition, this study confirms that relationship building is a vital mediator in the social relationship model. Managerial implications and future research directions are identified.

Use of Wikis for Enhancing E-Collaboration in Geographically-Dispersed Environments

Information technology has radically altered corporate structures and the way work is transacted in corporate organizations. Firms are seeking to enhance their efficiency by themselves becoming more geographically dispersed and by availing of the benefits of outsourcing. Functional groups are becoming increasingly “virtual” and spatially dispersed; much of organizational interaction is now technology mediated. These trends in turn call for further technology innovations to facilitate communication and collaboration in such situations. Wiki-based systems are an emergent and promising platform for technology mediated interaction. In this study, we describe a Wiki-based system, delineate its major features, and compare it with other available communication technologies. We then examine how the use of Wiki-based systems can enhance communication and collaboration outcomes in the context of a collaborative task, requirements elicitation, chosen for this purpose since it is high value and demands intense interaction across functional domains. We present a model and develop an understanding of the manner in which specific Wiki features enhance three variables – media richness, contextual richness, and organizational memory – which in turn impact communication quality as well as requirements quality in terms of the clarity, completeness, and consistency of a requirements specification. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study and of possible future research in this area.

A Framework Describing the Relationships among Social Technologies and Social Capital Formation in Electronic Entrepreneurial Networking

E-commerce technologies—including online exchanges—focus heavily on transaction support. They are designed primarily to reduce transaction costs between suppliers, producers, distributors, and customers. Entrepreneurs however are not likely to realize the full business potential of e-commerce unless the transaction technologies are simultaneously supported by technology-enabled social learning networks used to stimulate the formation of social capital in its three primary manifestations. Toward that end this article argues that a number of Internet-based social technologies (e.g., email, chat, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.) can be used more effectively when it is understood that each technology offers different characteristics in support of the formation of different dimensions of social capital. This article presents a conceptual framework describing the capacities of various social technologies for supporting the formation of social capital. A primary thrust of the article is that alignment of a social technology infrastructure with the social capital requirements in entrepreneurial communities will facilitate the formation of electronic learning networks, enabling more collaborative and therefore more successful entrepreneurial communities.

Understanding the Progressive Nature of Inter-Organizational Systems (IOS) Adoption

Inter-organizational Systems (IOS) cannot be adopted by any organizations in isolation from their trading partner. Their adoption requires cooperation and collaboration between trading partners and, therefore, is reliant on the nature of relationships between the parties involved. For organizations to progress in their IOS adoption, improvement in relationships between trading partners is required before they can adopt a more sophisticated IOS. In addition, through IOS adoption, trading partners can actually improve their relationships overtime. There has been some research that investigates relationships and how organizations progress from one level to the next level of adoption. However, these studies do not clearly define the concepts of relationship, IOS adoption and IOS adoption maturity. Furthermore, they do not adequately justify the exclusion of other variables in defining the relevant concepts and are not theoretically based. This research extends the Kurnia and Johnston (2000) process model of IOS adoption by incorporating the notion of IOS adoption maturity and reducing the scope from a supply chain to a dyadic level to enable better evaluations of IOS adoption progression. We argue that with the proposed model, the dynamics of IOS adoption maturity can be better examined empirically.

What Drives Firms to Engage in Interorganizational Information Sharing in Supply Chain Management?

With growing use of interorganizational systems, the scope of interfirm collaboration has increased considerably, particularly in the supply chain context. An important prerequisite of interfirm collaboration is information sharing. Extant research suggests clear advantages of information sharing. The research at hand addresses antecedents of interorganizational information sharing. Based on findings from interorganizational systems adoption and interfirm collaboration research, a structural model is developed and validated by a quantitative survey among Austrian retailers and manufacturers in the fast-moving consumer-goods sector. The proposed model analyzes the effect of internal factors (commitment, information policy, and technical readiness), interorganizational factors (relationship, trust, power, and trading partners’ technical readiness), and economic factors (perceived benefits and costs) on information-sharing behavior. The results show the relevance of internal factors and perceived benefits. The study reveals particularities of information-sharing behavior and can help practitioners to understand what motivates their trading partners to share information.

The Impacts of Electronic Collaboration and Information Exploitation Capability on Firm Performance

We assessed the effects of electronic collaboration using inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) on firm performance, particularly between dominant buyers and their suppliers. From the suppliers’ perspective, we examined ways in which higher levels of performance can be achieved by increasing the extent that they proactively participate in business activities using IOIS. We defined electronic collaboration as consisting of two major activities: electronic information sharing (EIS) and electronic cooperation (ECo). We also evaluated the extent of EIS and ECo that suppliers contribute to their development of an information exploitation capability (IEC). This capability enables them to utilize internally both information and knowledge created from electronic collaboration. In addition, we assessed the effects of electronic collaboration activities and IEC on a firm performance. We collected surveys from 169 firms, and conducted a Structural Equation Model analysis. We also empirically tested the research model and five hypotheses. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that electronic information sharing exerts a clear effect on electronic cooperation. We determined that EIS and ECo are major sources for the development of IEC and that both ECo and IEC result in improved company performance. Both electronic information sharing and electronic cooperation substantially foster an information exploitation capability. We also determined that the information exploitation capability has a partial mediating effect between electronic information sharing and electronic cooperation on firm performance.

Synthesizing the Research Advances in Electronic Collaboration

This article has the objectives to discuss the background for the two special issues of International Journal of e-Collaboration on electronic collaboration in organizations, examine four theoretical frameworks with particular regard to their relevance to the content in the articles in the special issues, and summarize each of the nine articles in these issues. The articles in the special issues are diverse in conceptual theory, units of analysis, research methods, and levels of collaboration. Units of analysis span from the individual, virtual team, company to the dyadic relationship between firms. Electronic collaboration is studied in locales including Austria, Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. The diversity extends knowledge within varied realms of the electronic collaboration field. This introductory article offers an overall framework for these two special issues to help readers and potential authors see how the studies relate to one another and to the overall body of knowledge.

Collaborative Design of Business and Information Systems

The collaborative design of business and information systems touches a number of issues that lie within the realm of different research areas. It deals with design as such and in particular with design in and for groups. It is also concerned with socio-technical systems and hence with human-computer interaction as well as IT-mediated human-human interaction. This introduces collaboration issues. The significant complexity of the business and information systems that are in the focus of the design endeavor calls for modeling as an instrument for managing this complexity. This paper maps the terrain of collaborative design of business and information systems by surveying the contributions that are made by related areas of research.

Satisfaction as a Function of Perceived Change in Likelihood of Goal Attainment

E-collaboration users tend to abandon their technology when they feel dissatisfied by their experience, even if they have been productive. It is therefore important to understand the causes of satisfaction so we can design and deploy e-collaboration in ways that make users both productive and satisfied. We advance a theory proposing satisfaction as a function of a perceived change in the likelihood of goal attainment (LGA). We test the theory in two countries (United States and The Netherlands) that differ along Hofstede’s (1991) masculinity-femininity cultural dimension. Empirical findings support the theory in both countries among 367 knowledge workers using e-collaboration to address real organizational problems and issues. We discuss the implications for research and practice.

Internationalization of Online Professional Communities

We report on an empirical investigation of the internationalization of an online community of practice situated in academe and which fosters among its members communication and collaboration. Attracting additional active participants throughout the world is an important goal for many online professional communities. Based on theories and findings in the innovation diffusion and international business literature, we propose that cultural distance has significant negative effects on the activity of an online community encompassing different countries, while economic conditions will moderate this negative impact. An empirical study based on the archival data from AIS-ISWorld, an online community of information systems academics, supports our central hypotheses.