Effects of Identifiability and Perceived Co-Worker Effort on Virtual Team Performance

This paper reports an experiment that investigates how identifiability and perceived co-workers’ effort affect a team member’s performance in virtual team collaboration. The results indicate that identifiability by itself does not affect group performance. On the other hand, receiving information about co-workers’ performance increase group performance regardless of the perceived level of co-workers’ performance. In addition, participants who perceived that their co-workers contributed a lot to the group task experienced significantly more social comparison with identified input than with anonymous input. However, this motivation gain did not translate into performance gain. Implications of these results and future research are discussed.