Assignment 6

Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii'lntemational Conference on System Sciences - 2007

Effective versus Ineffective Communication Behaviors in Virtual Teams

Daphne M. Dekker, Christel G. Rutte

Department of Technology Management Subdepartment of Human Performance Management

TU Eindhoven The Netherlands

E-Mail: D. M. Dekker@tm. tue. nl

Abstract

The Critical Incident technique was used to interview 18 professional virtual team workers about their experiences with eflective and inefective communication behaviors of virtual team workers. We clustered the 31 7 behaviors that we found into 11 categories that are critical for the success or failure of a team andor satisfaction of team members. These categories are discussed, and suggestions are made for firture research.

1. Introduction

workers. One of the advantages is reduction of workflow and travel expenses. Virtual teams are faced with unique challenges due to geographical distance [3]. The use of virtual teams has increased dramatically in recent years, especially since the Intemet enables the effortless sharing and distribution of information. The advantages of virtual teams are evident. According to Lu, Watson-Manheim, House, and Matzkevich [4], globally dispersed teams incorporate talents from different locations. Besides that, key holders can be chosen for their proximity to important customers and other stakeholders. Virtual teams use computer and communication technologies to communicate with other team members. Examples of these technologies are: chat, e-mail, audio conference, and video conference.

Today, many organizations use virtual teams to meet the challenges of market competition and

There are two leading theories involving

turbulence [I]. Townsend, DeMarie, and Hendrickson communication technologies in virtual work groups.

[2] describe virtual teams as a geographically andlor These theories classify the communication technologies

organizationally dispersed group of coworkers who use into categories. The first is Media Richness Theory [5,

a combination of telecommunication and information 61 and the second is Media Synchronicity Theory [7].

sharing technologies to accomplish an organizational task. In literature, virtual teams are also referred to as globally dispersed or distributed teams. The goal of this study is to provide more insight into effective and ineffective behaviors of virtual team workers. In the introduction we first provide more information about virtual teams and the media virtual team workers use to communicate. Then we further talk about communication behavior. In the last section of the introduction we will go deeper into communication behavior in virtual teams.

1.1 Virtual teams

Media Richness Theory describes communication media on a continuum from poor media to rich media. Richer media are those with great language variety (ability to convey natural language rather than just numeric information), a greater multiplicity of cues (the number of ways in which a message can be communicated), a great personalization (possibility to personalize the message) and more rapid feedback (extent to which the medium enables users to directly respond to one another to seek clarification, redirect, or terminate the conversation) [7]. Media richness is defined as the ability of information to change understanding within time interval . Interactions that overcome different frames of reference or clarify

teams organizations to 'OmPete in the ambiguous issues to change understanding in a timely global economy by integrating the talents of dispersed

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

manner are consideren rich [S]. An example of a rich medium is face-to-face communication and one of a poor medium is a formal unaddressed document. The theory states that task performance will be improved when task needs are matched to a medium's richness [51.

Dennis and Valacich [7] further developed the Media Richness Theory into a more advanced theory: Media Synchronicity Theory. This theory states that a set of five media capabilities are important for group work. Effectiveness is influenced by matching the media capabilities to the needs of the fundamental communication processes. These five media capabilities are: Immediacy of feedback, symbol variety, parallelism, rehearsability, and reprocessability. Immediacy of feedback is the extent t o which the medium enables users to give rapid feedback on the communication they receive. Symbol variety is very similar to multiplicity of cues from Media Richness Theory. Parallelism is the number of communications that can exist simultaneously. Rehearsability is the ability to go over the message before communicating it to the sender. Finally, Reprocessability is the ability to reexamine the message within the communication event. Contrary to Media Richness Theory, in Media Synchronicity Theory it is not possible to label one type of medium as richest. A medium can be rich in some media capabilities, and poor in other media capabilities. These theories are about media. However, not only media selection is important for effective virtual teams, but also how and what team members communicate while they are using these media. In the next section we will provide some information about communication behavior of people.

1.2 Communication behavior

Communicatio~i is essential to the functioning of an organization. Although anyone will have an idea about what communication is, it is difficult to provide a definition in words of a word that is about using words. Lesikar and Pettit [9] present a framework about the communication process. This model shows that people pick up messages from the environment that surrounds us. The messages we pick up will go though mental filters. Since everyone has different thoughts, emotional make-ups, and experiences, everyone will give a personal meaning to a message picked up from the environment. The process of creating messages out of the meanings in our brains is called encoding, and the process of picking up and giving meaning to these

messages is called decoding. Most often, miscommunication will arise during the process of decoding [9].

Another aspect of communication is the channel by which the message is transmitted. When sending a message face to face, we can send a very rich message. However, in virtual teams face to face contact is rare and other channels are used more often. The richness of these channels is usually less and fewer messages can be transmitted. For example, during an audio conference, it is impossible to transmit visual messages and in an e-mail is it not possible to transmit an audio message.

1.3 Communication and virtual teams

In this paper we focus on the behavior of people that are members of a virtual team. More precisely, we focus on the communication behavior between virtual team members that make a team either effective (reach goals, finish task on time etc.) or ineffective, andlor satisfy or dissatisfy virtual team members. We think that effective communication of the team members leads towards positive outcomes. Even if all the communication media are perfect, we think human behavior causes a team to fail or to succeed, or, as Hulnick nicely put it:

"If technology is the foundation of the virtual business relationship, communication is the cement" (p. 33) [lo].

To our knowledge a systematic study that gives an overview of effective versus ineffective behaviors is lacking in literature. Many researchers have used student teams to conduct systematic research [e.g. 11, 12, 13,141, but it remains questionable whether student teams accurately reflect the global market in which real virtual teams operate. Also, a lot of popular literature has been written about virtual teams [e.g. 151, and we think it is important to study the subject in a more systematic and academic way.

Lee [S] has done some interesting research about the richness of media. What the author found is that a medium is rich because of the way the interaction is and the organizational context and not because of the characteristics of the media. This author also points out the importance of behavior of people and the effectiveness of communication between people that use communication media.

Many authors in popular literature [e.g. 151 emphasize the importance of a face to face meeting at the beginning of a virtual project. During a face to face

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

meeting, the team should focus on making personal contact to get to know each other, understanding individual roles, establishing clear objectives, deciding who will be doing what, and agreeing on the methods and levels of communication. Beagrie [15] argues that communication in virtual teams should be maximized. For regular conference calls it is advised to have an ice-breaker. Furthermore, team members should phone each other regularly to promote informal contact. The last advice that Beagrie gives is that it in a meeting is important to communicate when you will schedule the next meeting, but make sure that one remains accessible.

Maznevski and Chudoba [16] examined three virtual teams. They found that successful teams developed a rhythm in media chosen. Both face to face and computer mediated communication were important. The successful teams' communication was characterized by high message frequency, positive tone, and appropriate feedback. Like Ocker, Fjermestad, Hiltz, and Johnson [17], Maznevski and Chudoba [16] found that successful teams produced higher quality work and higher team satisfaction. Kayworth and Leidner [18] support Maznevski and Chudoba in their finding that successful teams have a preference for a variety of communication media.

Many researchers found that information sharing has a positive relationship with virtual team performance and satisfaction [19, 20,211.

According to Johnson, Heimann, & OTJeill [22] the biggest complaints in virtual team working are related to communication problems. According to these authors, complaints fall into three categories: (a) Lack of project visibility, (b) contacting people, and (c) constraints in technology.

Considering communication, Van der Smagt [23] distinguishes two way monologues from dialogue. In a dialogue the assumptions behind the communicated information are reflected. A two way monologue is more about exchanging information, without considering differences in interpretation of the message. Therefore, dialogue should be the primary form of communication in virtual teams.

A lot has been written about virtual teams. Besides, much has been written about communication. In this study we combine these topics which have been addressed by fewer authors. Since deep studies about this subject are rare, a more systematic approach is needed. The goal of this study is to investigate what communication behaviors are critical for the Success or failure of a virtual team.

2. Method

To distinguish effective and ineffective behaviors of virtual team workers, we used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) [24]. In order to solve practical problems and develop broad psychological principles, Flanagan offers a procedure to collect examples of human behavior. An incident is defined as "any observable human activity that is sufficiently complete in itself to permit inferences and predictions to be made about the person performing the act" (p. 327). Flanagan states that an incident should have special significance and meet systematically defined criteria. This technique is very useful for our study, since we aim to solve the practical problem of developing an instrument that maps critical communication behaviors while working in virtual teams. We followed the five steps for CIT as described by Flanagan [24].

In step 1, 'general aims', the goal of this study is described. We want to distinguish effective communication behavior from ineffective communication behavior. Effective communication behavior leads to high satisfaction of the team members and/or high performance of the team. Ineffective communication, on the other hand, leads to low satisfaction of the team members and/or low performance of the team. We thus want to know which communication behavior leads to low or high satisfaction of the team members, and/or low performance of the team.

In step 2, 'plans and specifications', we defined what persons are to be interviewed and what situations are of interest. Since we wanted to gain more insight into effective versus ineffective communication behaviors in virtual teams, we considered professional virtual team workers to be the most appropriate persons to be interviewed. All situations in which virtual teams work were considered relevant for this study. We interviewed virtual team members from a large oil and software company. We conducted 18 interviews. Fourteen interviewees were Dutch, two were American, one was Finnish and one was English. Some were members of the same virtual team. Experience with working in virtual teams ranged from 1 year up to 15 years.

In step 3, 'Collecting the data', the interviews were conducted. Each interview lasted 45 up to 60 minutes. We used an interview scheme to guard that the incidents reported were (a) related to the actual behavior that was (b) observed by the interviewee, (c) that all relevant factors concerning the situation were reported, and the interviewee clearly (d) judged and (e)

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

founded the criticalness of the behavior [24]. The first questions in the interview scheme were about the background of the organization and team of the interviewee. We asked for (a) a description of the job and organization, (b) a description of the team, (c) how experienced they were with working virtually, (d) what communication media they use to communicate in the virtual team and (e) how often they use the particular media. The main part of the interview was about the critical incidents. After discussing effective and ineffective communication behaviors, the interviewees were asked the following questions: "Now I want you to think back over the past 6 to 12 months of specific incidents that you have seen occur. Can you think of an incident of effective or ineffective communication behavior that team members showed in a virtual team of which you are a member? Would you describe per example: (1) what were the circumstances surrounding this incident? (2) What exactly did the team member do that .was either effective or ineffective, and (3) How did the behavior effect the satisfaction of the team members and/or the performance of the team?" The interviewees were asked to think of as many critical incidents as possible. If interviewees had problems to think of critical incidents we tried to ask the question in a different way: "Think of the most (in)effective communicating person in your team. Suppose I would argue that this person's communication is (in)effective. What incidents can you cite to change my opinion? What communication behavior did that team member show that was (in)effective. Would you describe per example: (1) what were the circumstances surrounding this incident? (2) What exactly did the team member do that was either effective or ineffective, and (3) How did the behavior effect the satisfaction of the team members and/or the performance of the team."

Interviewees received this interview scheme a week prior to the interview. Thus they were able to prepare themselves. In order to standardize the interview, all interviews were conducted by the same interviewer. Prior to the interview, the interviewees were (a) informed that the conversation would be kept confidential to the research team; (b) informed that their name, or the names they mentioned would not be used in any published article; and (c) asked permission to record the interview (all interviewees gave permission). Then the questions from the interview scheme were addressed. If the interviewee had anything important to add, he or she was invited to do so. Also, if a critical incident that an intewiewee mentioned was less clear or specific than desired, the interviewer would ask for clarification. The digital records of the interviews were transcribed and a list of detailed

descriptions off all critical incidents was compiled from these transcriptions.

Step 4, "analyzing the data", and step 5, "interpreting and reporting", were performed after following the detailed description of how to proceed with the categorization offered in steps by Latham and Wexley [24]. Next we will report how we implemented these steps.

The first step was to transform the critical incidents into behavioral items. This was important since all items needed to be phrased in a useful way [25] or because some critical incidents contained multiple behavioral items (p. 66) [26]. We used the behavioral items as an input for the categorization process. Next, we randomly took out 10% of the items [25] which we later used to establish content validity.

3. Results

In total 3 17 behavioral items were derived from the interviews. The majority of the interviewees reported between 7 and 16 critical incidents (mean = 10.1; sd = 3) that happened in the last year. This indicates that responses were evenly spread over the respondents and none of them was overrepresented.

Next we randomly took out 10% of the items. The remaining items were used to establish a categorization framework with main categories. Two raters independently worked on this. When comparing the two individually derived frameworks, both raters agreed on eleven main categories of (in)effective communication behavior in virtual teams. Also a third independent rater was asked to put the behavioral items into the categories. Some minor adjustments were made after discussing some differences.

Finally, the content validity of the categorizations was checked using the 10% of the behavioral items that had been left out initially. These were categorized into the eleven categories. If, based on this categorization, a category had to be added to the framework, or if two or more behavioral items had to be added to a category, content validity would not yet be attained and more incidents would have to be collected. Table 1 shows the 11 categories we found and the number of critical behaviors that we categorized in each category.

Table 1. Categories and number of critical behaviors per category

I NO I Category I Number of I Critical behaviors

Clear and complete communication

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

We came up with the following 11 categories of communication behavior in virtual teams:

1 . Clear and complete communication (n=82)

Virtual team members must be very clear and complete in what they communicate. Examples of these behaviors were mentioned by all interviewees and are thus very important. A virtual team worker must remember that if helshe does not explicitly say or mention something, the message does not necessarily reach team members. One intewiewee mentioned "I wrote an e-mail with an instruction, but when I checked later, that person had not done anything. I learned to specify my expectations. If I need an answer before noon, I tell my team member that I expect an answer back before noon."

Intewiewees mentioned incidents in which team members used jargon language of which other team members were not aware. A virtual team can composed of people from different organizations who use different jargon. Therefore, one should never assume that team members share the same jargon.

Another aspect that has to do with clear and complete communication is the communication about problems with progress. A virtual team member should mention problems with progress of a task to the team. This is important, because if one does not share the same office or building, one will not see if someone is having problems. Also clear communication is important about what one can and cannot do. One should always be honest and clear about willingness or ability to do a task. One interviewee mentioned that he sometimes just says that he will do a task, just to finish the discussion. This is very ineffective, since he does not have time to do the task.

Finally, a lot of problems seemed to occur because virtual team members failed to communicate their

actions to the team. As mentioned before, in a virtual team, people do not see each other, therefore it is important to say what one does or what one is working on in words.

2. Use appropriate media (n=42)

Team members can use media in very many effective and ineffective ways. This category is about this behavior.

One intewiewee mentioned that some colleagues used the wrong medium to communicate. For instance, one intewiewee said "My colleague, who is located in India, shows ping-pong behavior with e-mail." With ping-pong behavior he meant that his colleague kept sending e-mails with small questions, whereas if they had picked up the phone it would have been clear much quicker. Many interviewees mentioned the importance of choosing the right medium to match the task or message. Also interviewees mentioned that if a medium does not work, one should use a different medium instead. Almost all intewiewees felt more satisfied if their colleagues called them to ask something, or if they felt able to call that colleague themselves. Interestingly, all but one interviewee mentioned that they felt more comfortable to pick up the phone after having seen the team member face to face.

Intewiewees also said that if there were problems it was effective to use a more direct medium

Another thing intewiewees thought was effective is to vary the medium used. Interviewees also mentioned that chat was useful to ask a short and direct question like "are you in the office?"

3 . Manage, plan, and structure the work process and meeting (n=27)

During the interview several intewiewees said that it is very important that the team has regular meetings. These meetings need to be very structured. Also planning is important. One interviewee mentioned that "during a meeting a team member started showing something to the people around him or her. One of my team members and I dialed in the meeting and could not see what our team members shared. Our colleague failed to share visuals with us prior to the meeting." Sharing visual ahead is something that should have been planned in advantage (by the team leader). Another interviewee said that his team leader behaved very effective: "My leaders schedules a teleconference meeting every two weeks, this is very effective. Our old leader did not do this, we hardly ever spoke to each other and nobody knew what the other team members

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

were doing." This category is thus about behavior that should happen prior to meetings.

4. Predictable and reliable communication (n=21)

This category is about the predictability and reliability of communication, about when to communicate. One important problem here is that team members sometimes do not reply to e-mails. This causes frustration of team members who are waiting for a response, which in turn can cause a delay in projects.

It is thus important to reply to colleagues. One interviewee mentioned that one of his team members always replies. "Last week I sent an e-mail to a colleague and he replied immediately that he did not have time to look at the e-mail now, but that he would respond to me in 4 hours. This is very effective and satisfying." It is better to reply that you do not have an answer, than to not reply at all. The sender could then still be waiting for the reply, whereas if his team members say that they cannot answer, the sender will look elsewhere to solve his or her problem.

5 . Involve all team members (n=16)

The fifth category is about involving all team members. Problems seem to occur when there is a core of team members in one place and one or two isolates elsewhere. One interviewee mentioned that she felt left out during meetings in which she was the only person that dialed in from elsewhere. The core team seemed to talk with one another, and to forget that the isolate member was there. This does not only happen in meetings. Also outside of meetings, team members should not forget to involve their colleagues that are not around the coffee machine. Moreover, team leaders should involve members when making decisions. This category is about behavior of team members during a virtual team meeting.

6. Participate actively (n=18)

The sixth category is about active participation in meetings. Several interviewees mentioned problems with isolates who are doing other things during the meeting. One interviewee said "when I am sitting alone during a dial-in meeting, I do other things like checking my e-mail." Other interviewees mentioned similar behaviors of colleagues that were isolated. One interviewee said that he could hear the computer board of an isolated member. Besides being present and not doing other things, it is important that team members

also actively participate during the meeting by saying things, when necessary.

7. Prosocial behavior (n=52)

The seventh category has to do with prosocial behavior in the group. This is not only important during a team meeting but also when working on a task individually. This includes behavior that is oriented towards team goals instead of individual goals. Also when a team member sees that another team member is busy, they should help that team member. Another example that falls into this category is about sharing knowledge and not keeping the knowledge to themselves. An interviewee mentioned that it satisfied him that when a team member figured out how something worked, the team member shared this on a forum.

Another behavior that was mentioned quit often, especially by team members working together with Indian people, was proactive behavior. According to our interviewees, Indian people often failed to show proactive behavior. One interviewee mentioned: "I was on a holiday, when I came back it turned out that my Indian colleague had been waiting for me to give new instructions when he finished."

8. Take into account language, time zone, and cultural differences (n=25)

This category deals with language, time zone, and cultural differences of virtual team members. Virtual teams often exist of people from all over the world. The first thing team members should take into account is language differences. Most teams use English as their primary language. It is important that virtual team members behave in such a way that they are willing to speak that language. One interviewee said that he had a German colleague who refused to talk English. This is not effective. Also a native English team member said that when he speaks English to non native English speaking people, he makes sure he adapts his level of English to the level of the nonnative English speaker.

Several behaviors have been mentioned about time zone differences. Teams should take into account the time zones when scheduling a meeting. Also it is fair to switch around who has to wake up early or to stay up late. One team member from the US said that she adjusted her working hours to her Dutch team members. She starts working at 5 a.m. Thus she is able to spend more time with her Dutch colleagues.

The last behavior in this category is behavior concerning cultural differences. For instance, a Dutch

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

team member said that he was more careful with caused problems when he got mad when things did not directness towards foreign team members, as compared finish on time. to other Dutch team members. According to the interviewee, Dutch people are very direct in their 4. ~ i ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ i ~ ~ communication.

9. Tension control (n=13)

This category is about humor and self control. One interviewee said "one of my team members uses humor in meetings, he will make jokes. I think this is very effective." Another thing that interviewees found effective is an ice-breaker at the beginning of a meeting: "My team member said that he went to a movie last night. He thought it was the best movie he had ever seen. Then he asked all team members what their favorite movie was. This way everybody had a say, and I felt comfortable to start talking in the meeting because I already had said something."

In addition, virtual team members must be very careful not to lose self control. One interviewee said that he always counts to 10 in virtual meetings. Another interviewee said that he waits a day with responding to some e-mails.

10. Superfluous communication (n-13)

When interviewees mentioned this category, they felt very strong about it. For instance one virtual team worker said "one of my colleagues keeps sending cc's of his e-mails to me, I have no clue why he does that, but it fills up my inbox and annoys me". Another behavior that team members show is forwarding messages that are not necessary to sent to everyone. Also some team members mentioned that it was ineffective that some team members sent messages to the entire team, whereas they also could have been sent only to the team member in question.

11. Non-task-related social communication (n=7)

The final category is about non-task-related communication. One interviewee said that their team does not have "coffee-machine-like" schedules to talk about non-task related things. This caused dissatisfaction according to that interviewee.

Another interviewee mentioned that things went wrong because the team never talked about non-task- related issues. When the team came together or when they had contact they only talked about the task. For this reason the manager of a team did not know about the personal situation of a team member and this

In this section we first want to discuss the categories. Then we will talk about some limitations and ideas for future research.

We came up with eleven categories of critical communication behaviors of virtual team workers. The first category, clear and complete communications, was mentioned by every interviewee, and it can therefore be said that this is a very important category in virtual teams. More so than classical face to face team members, virtual team members need to communicate everything that face to face team members normally would see and observe

We think that most categories are also important in face to face teams but that they are extra important in virtual teams. Fully face to face teams are becoming rare. Since more and more teams also use communication media to communicate, these categories also become more important for more traditional teams.

Category 4 is about predictable and reliable communication, about when to communicate. According to professional virtual team workers, it is a very ineffective behavior to not respond in a timely matter. Cramton [27] also mentioned this problem in her work. She talks about "silence" after writing an e- mail to someone without getting a reply. Cramton says that virtual team workers have trouble with interpreting the meaning of silence (not hearing back from someone you try to contact) and that it is usually interpreted as a personal failure instead as a cause of the environment.

Also categories 2, 3, and 7 were mentioned very often. Category 2 is about the medium used by the team member. The virtual team experts that we interviewed seemed to prefer the telephone as a medium to solve problems over chat and e-mail. This is in accordance with the Media Richness Theory [5] and Media Synchronicity Theory [7] as mentioned in the introduction. For short and practical questions, e-mail is perceived most effective. For knowledge sharing, our interviewees mentioned forums. In accordance with the findings of Kayworth and Leidner [18], professional virtual team workers also think that it is effective to vary the medium used.

Managing, planning, and structuring the work process and meetings are very important for effective team functioning. This third category contains behaviors usually performed by team leaders or managers. They need to schedule regular meetings and give structure

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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007

during meetings. Beargie [15] also mentioned the importance of this.

The seventh category is about prosocial behavior. The professional virtual team workers mentioned that this contributed to the effectiveness of the team and to the satisfaction of the team members. Prosocial behavior is the willingness of individuals to invest effort and energy in their social environment beyond any formal requirement and with no expectation of formal rewards [28]. Especially in virtual teams it is important to be a team worker, since the team is less visible. It is easy to work for individual goals.

Saunders [29], Melymuka [30], and Lipnack and Stamps [3 11 also argue that virtual team members are usually selected for their competence and knowledge in a specific area. Therefore, they may be asked to serve on several teams. Because team members are dispersed, it may not be readily apparent that a person has been placed on too many teams and is overcommitted. When team members are overcommitted they may not have time for citizenship behavior. They then have too many goals to work on. It is therefore important that organizations take this into account. Also team members themselves should communicate clearly when they are overcommitted and are unable to do certain tasks (category 1).

Category 5 and 6 are about involving other team members and about involving oneself. In virtual teams it happens that some team members are isolated in a different country and dial in to a meeting of a core group at a different location. According to professional virtual team workers it was very ineffective when the isolates were "forgotten". Therefore it is important that isolated team members are actively involved by other team members. This can be done by asking them about their opinion so they can have their say. On the other hand, team members should also involve themselves in the meeting, and actively participate. Doing other things, like writing e-mails during a meeting, is not very effective. Of coursc this behavior is not very prevalent in face to face meetings, because everybody can see that the member is not participating. We think the role of isolated team members is very interesting. Some team members think that such members do not add many things because they are outside the core team and have trouble influencing the team. Conversely other team workers think that the role of an isolate team member is valuable since that team member is able to look at the discussion from a more objective point of view. O'Leary [32] tested this in an experiment and found data supporting the valuable role of an isolate. Much more insight is needed on this topic, and

it is therefore an interesting subject to investigate further.

Another category that is resulting fiom global organizations is the eighth category about language, time zones and cultural differences. The professional virtual team workers we interviewed have team members from all over the world. All these members have different time zones, languages, and cultures. It is effective to show behavior that respects these differences. A category that can add to the understanding of team members is talking about non- task-related or social communication (category 11). Compared to face to face teams, virtual teams spend less time talking about non-task-related subjects [e.g. 33, 341. Professional virtual team workers, however, said that it is effective for teams to talk about this. Virtual team workers say that it positively influences satisfaction and performance of the team.

The ninth category, tension control, we also see in the category of Bales [35]. We also added humor to this. Humor is a way to lessen tension and to make team members feel more comfortable.

Superfluous communication (category 10) was not mentioned by every interviewee, but when mentioned people seemed to feel very strong about it, Most of us have e-mail and we all know how easy it is to send out a message or forward a message to a group of people. However, we often fail to think whether those people really need the message. If team members do not need the message, it only fills up their inbox. Interviewees felt strongly dissatisfied with cc and forward e-mails, and it also costs time to find out that the e-mail contains superfluous and unnecessary information. Several interviewees said that their team now has regulations to deal with this. Some said that they are not allowed to forward a message without personalizing the message and saying why you forwarded it. Also some teams had regulations about not being allowed to copy a message to more than 2 team members.

Throughout the discussion, some limitations and suggestions for future research have already been mentioned. This is a first study that categorizes communication behaviors of virtual team workers. For future research it would be good to retest the category system with a larger sample. If in future studies the sample is larger this might alter the content of the categories. Moreover, it may increase the reliability of the categories.

For the present study we used professional virtual team workers from western countries. These workers gave their opinion about effective and ineffective

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communication behaviors o f virtual team workers. Especially professional virtual team workers that have Indian colleagues had a lot o f complaints about ineffectiveness o f their behavior. O w information w a s from the western point o f view. F o r h t u r e research it would b e very interesting to contrast this view with, for example, the Indian point o f view.

A strength o f this study is that we have given categories o f behaviors that we collected from critical behaviors from experienced professional virtual team workers. These categories can be used as an instrument t o see h o w virtual teams in practice can b e improved. Observing teams, researchers can use this as an instrument t o observe what ineffective and effective communication behaviors exist i n virtual teams. Thus, virtual team members can b e made aware o f this and individuals can try to improve their communication behavior.

10. References

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Proceedings of t h e 40th Hawaii International Conference o n System Sciences - 2007

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