Supporting Creative Group Processes - Groupware for Communication and Coordination

The idea of the creative individualist spawning innovations as a solitude effort is no longer realistic. Huge innovation projects, relying on project teams, have to be permanently conducted by organizations to assure their competitiveness. These projects often take place in distributed teams, making use of groupware to bridge temporal and geographical distances. Research in social psychology on group processes has revealed that group work suffers from several group process losses such as information overload, production blocking, free riding and evaluation apprehension. Moreover, creative group processes have to be coordinated to assure goal orientation and efficiency. In the shade of the Media Synchronicity Theory and Coordination theory we analyze aspects of communication and coordination support of groupware functionality. We conclude that idea generation should be supported by synchronous groupware functionality whilst idea evaluation merits from asynchronous functionality. Moreover both phases do not depend on single outstanding but various groupware functionalities to support coordination.