Multimedia and Virtual Teams: Results of an Experimental Research

With the rapid development and extensive application of information technologies, use of virtual teams to encourage collaboration with students from other campuses is receiving increasing attention from educators. Prior research has demonstrated that it is difficult for the virtual team to achieve the same performance as the traditional face-to-face team. We wanted to study whether the use of a multimedia case study into the teaming experience will narrow the gap between the performance of the virtual team and the face-to-face team. An experiment was designed to compare the performance of eight virtual teams and eight face-to-face teams of students from two universities. The teams were asked to solve a case study problem and present the results using information technologies within a limited time. The performance of the teams was measured during and at the end of the case study by means of students’ final grades, meeting records, and an online survey involving five constructs. The results of the research led rejecting the hypotheses that the virtual team could achieve the same performance as the face-to-face team. The results indicated that the virtual teams’ performance in terms of personal satisfaction, mission clarity, and group cohesion were significantly lower than the face-to-face teams. There were no significant differences between the performances of the two types of teams in terms of group behavior, skill development, time spent and final grade perspectives. This paper interprets these results and discusses the findings.