The influence of emergent technologies on decision-making processes in virtual teams

Despite the popularity of virtual teams (VTs), little is known about the decision-making process of VTs collaborating over emergent technologies, such as 3D virtual environments (VEs) with avatars and web-conferencing tools (WCTs) that include audio, text and video. This study explores how these technologies influence the decision-making process of 21 VTs, solving a group task. The group sessions were analyzed qualitatively through open coding of all sequential actions taking place during the 20 minute long sessions. The results indicated that the two technologies supported different stages of VT decision-making process, which is in line with media synchronicity theory (Dennis, Fuller & Valacich 2008). The VE turned out to have shortcomings that were, in MST terms, related to high parallelism, which hindered a successful convergence phase and resulted in impeded decision quality. These results shed new light on the importance of communication process fit of emergent technologies with multiple communication channels.