Virtual Teams Adapt to Simple E-Collaboration Technologies

Increased globalization of enterprises combined with widespread adoption of simple, low cost, asynchronous e-collaboration technologies (e.g., bulletin board, e-mail) provides incentive to attempt increasingly complex problem solving with virtual teams. If complex business process improvement activities could be conducted using asynchronous e-collaboration, the potential to reduce competition for resources by reducing travel time and increasing the communication window to 24/7 improves the ability to simultaneously address the multiple priorities of daily business and business process improvement. The knowledge that virtual process improvement teams have been successful (DeLuca, Gasson, & Kock, 2006; Kock & DeLuca, 2006; DeLuca & Valacich, 2006; Kock, 2006) and lessons learned from those teams may be what is needed to provide confidence to organizations that virtual process improvement efforts would come to fruition. To manage such initiatives effectively, it is important to understand how these virtual teams overcame the difficulties of e-collaboration. Existing theories of information processing in organizations do not scale well to the complex forms of knowledge integration required at the boundary between the diverse teams found in virtual organizations. Thus, we based our investigation on a new theory of communication behavior, compensatory adaptation theory (CAT) (Kock, 2005b) and the relationships suggested by it, explained in the next section. We also operationalize a key construct, compensatory adaptations and present the adaptations made by participants in the study (DeLuca et al., 2006). BAcKground