Decision-making in virtual teams

Advances in technology have over the last two decades supported the development of virtual teams, constituted of geographically distributed members collaborating through technology. Virtual teams are formed to perform complex tasks, and successful decision-making is crucial for their performance. Despite the popularity of virtual teams, little is known about the nature of decision-making in them. There is a need to study this subject in more detail, and take into account the effects of the newest technologies. In this thesis I have chosen to investigate the decision-making process in virtual teams, aiming at discovering critical factors for success and failure. Earlier theories on decisionmaking in co-located teams are applied to test their validity for a virtual setting. I have also studied how technology specific features affect the decision-making process in order to shed light to what the role of technology is in virtual team decision-making. I studied 21 teams of three persons each, collaborating on a decision-making task in a laboratory setting. A web conferencing tool was used by half of the groups and a virtual environment by rest of the groups. The sessions were recorded and transcribed for enabling qualitative analysis of team discussions and interaction with technology. My findings supported the applicability of general decision-making theories for virtual teams. Especially, vigilant decision-making theory gained support from the findings. Factors, such as shared understanding, thorough discussion before decision, high amount of valuable information shared, much questioning, and reevaluation were found to be important for successful decisions. Unsuccessful teams, on the other hand, had reverse tendencies and made major wrong assumptions that led to poor decisions. High questioning and reevaluation could save a group that were about to make mistakes. Moreover, specific technology capabilities influenced slightly the virtual team decision-making. The web conferencing tool showed to have some advantages over the virtual environment in this specific task. Specifically, the virtual environment contained some pitfalls due to ease of use and a high possibility of individual and unprocessed decisions.