A Comparative Study of the Effect of Blogs and Email on Virtual Team Performance

Virtual Teams (VTs) offer great advantages but have different challenges compared with co-located teams. This study explores using blogs and email to see if improvements can be made to virtual team effectiveness. This preliminary study is qualitative in nature and uses a quasi-experiment to compare 2 teams performing the same project; one uses email while the other uses a blog tool. Once the project was complete the participants filled out a Q-sort and a short survey. Additional analysis of the artefacts generated by the experiments also form part of the result set. The key benefits of using the blog were hoped to be; increase team trust, increase team performance and output, increase team satisfaction and realise a communication tool that could be used in a virtual team environment. The main findings were; the qualities of the output deliverable from both teams were nearly the same; those using the blog reported ‘having a sense of fun’ and ‘individual satisfaction’, while the email team reported ‘the current status of the project was easily viewed’.