Impact of collaborative technology on virtual team performance

¶ … collaboration technology can assist virtual teams in today's business world. As Andriessen (2012) shows, there are positive and negative effects to using collaboration technology -- what needs to be better described is how these effects are produced and why.

Because of the still relative newness of virtual teams and collaborative technology (Gilson, Maynard, Young, 2015), it is essential to organizational success in the Digital Age that these concepts be understood as fully as they possibly can be. That requires assessing the nature of the relationship and how collaborative tech impacts virtual teams. As Fan, Chen and Wang (2014) note, collaborative tech has different effects depending on "creativity and idea generation performance" in the sense that "direction-giving instructions generate more ideas under the demanding feedback approach" while "receiving instructions with more empathetic language" results in "higher creativity performance under the encouraging feedback approach" (p. 421). This shows that collaborative technology and its impact is also dependent upon management skills and approaches. This is consistent with the findings of Sanders (2006) and Schyns and Schilling (2013), who show that leadership styles have a direct impact on how teams coordinate and conduct themselves at work.

Significance

This study is significant because the Digital Age has transformed the way the world operates in businesses and organization. People think, interact, communicate and organize largely in a virtual world. Thanks to the Internet this sort of environment is possible but virtual teams using collaborative technology are also subject to all the shortcomings that go along with this new innovative technology and the dependency upon it that now exists.

This study will be significant for anyone using virtual teams and/or collaborative technology to facilitate organizational success because it will show how management styles play a role in the collaborative tech and virtual team relationship.

Approach

The approach that this study will take is phenomenological. It will use both survey and interview methodology to collect data from virtual teams on their experience with collaborative technology.

Summary

Sources of data will be virtual teams in organizations and companies in the U.S. and data collection methods will consist of using digital surveys sent to companies following an explanation letter from the researcher.

Survey respondents will then be requested for interview for in-depth analysis so that better phenomenological results can be assessed.