The folks at Leading Virtually are getting ready to release the findings of some primary research they did on group effectiveness, and the preliminary results are discussed in a post from last week.
The research had two main parts. One evaluated the impact of critical and supportive communication on the effectiveness of group problem solving, and the other sought to determine if virtual world technology, such as Second Life, would impact the tone of communication.
Not surprisingly, groups that experienced higher levels of critical commentary, that is to say more disagreements with team members’ ideas, did not perform as well as the groups where exchanges were generally supportive. The inference here is that teams that can adjust their methods of communication to be less overtly critical can effectively raise their collaborative quotient.
This works because less confrontation and disagreement increases the cohesiveness of the team, ultimately improving their ability to reach consensus.
As far as the impact of Second Life at influencing the tone of communication, well:
Suffice it to say that Second Life was not associated with higher incidence of supportive communication or lower incidence of critical communication relative to instant messaging.
This is interesting to me. I would have thought that the generally impersonal nature of instant messaging would result in more terse and direct communication that would skip the niceties and tend towards the critical, a manifestation of keyboard courage, if you will.
Still, I don’t care how well rendered the avatars in Second Life are, they give the impression of cartoons. I find it hard to take a business meeting seriously when I’m sitting across the table, not from Barb and Simon from engineering and accounting, but from characters who favor Lara Croft and the Juggernaut.
But I mean that in the most positive way.
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