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Virtual teams i. There has been a multitude of studies examining the difficulties faced by collaborations and use of technology in various narrow contexts. However, there has been little work in examining the challenges faced by virtual teams and their use of technology to mitigate issues. To address this issue, a literature review was performed to highlight the collaboration challenges experienced by virtual teams and existing mitigation strategies.
In this review, a well-planned search strategy was utilized to identify a total of relevant studies, primarily focusing on technology use.
The physical factors relating to distance are tightly coupled with the cognitive, social, and emotional challenges faced by virtual teams. However, based on research topics in the selected studies, we separate challenges as belonging to five categories: geographical distance, temporal distance, perceived distance, the configuration of dispersed teams, and diversity of workers.
In addition, findings from this literature review expose opportunities for research, such as resolving discrepancies regarding the effect of tightly coupled work on collaboration and the effect of temporal dispersion on coordination costs.
Finally, we use these results to discuss opportunities and implications for designing groupware that better support collaborative tasks in virtual teams. Much like collaboration in co-located teams, collaboration in virtual teams refers to synchronous and asynchronous interactions and tasks to achieve common goals. The use of virtual teams allows organizations to enroll key specialists, regardless of their physical location [ , ].
This allows organizations to optimize teams by using only the best talent available [ 63 , ]. In theory, virtual teams also reduce the need for travelling between sites, which should reduce costs in terms of time, money, and stress [ ]. This implies that, as a result, virtual teams have become vital to maintaining our increasingly globalized social and economic infrastructure.
Similar to co-located teams, virtual teams participate in a variety of collaborative activities such as formal and informal meetings using technology like video conferencing e. As a result, virtual teams are experiencing difficulties collaborating that are making it difficult for them to be as successful as co-located teams [ 64 , , ]. As a result, virtual teams spend substantial time and money to relocate team members for specific projects to avoid the hindrances to teamwork associated with distance [ , ].
It is therefore important to develop technology that can better support virtual teams, reducing the need for costly re-locations and mitigating the problems that arise when relocation is not a viable solution. Despite previous research examining the difficulties faced by collaborations and use of technology in specific contexts, such as distributed software development, there has been little work in examining the challenges faced by all virtual teams and their use of technology to mitigate issues.
This understanding is vital to the development and utilization of technology to support virtual teams. Thus, this paper has two goals: 1 to elucidate the factors and challenges that hinder collaboration in virtual teams and 2 provide recommendations for designing groupware to better support collaboration in virtual teams, while also identifying opportunities for the Human—Computer Interaction HCI community to design this technology.
To achieve our goals, a Literature Review LR was performed with a well-planned search strategy that identified a total of relevant studies, primarily focusing on technology use. Based on the selected studies, we categorized challenges as being related to: geographical distance, temporal distance, perceived distance, the configuration of dispersed teams, and diversity of workers. In addition, results from this LR identify opportunities for research, such as resolving discrepancies regarding the effect of tightly coupled work on collaboration, the effect of temporal dispersion on coordination costs, and whether virtual teams encounter more work-culture related problems than co-located teams.
From the synthesis of these papers, we present four design implications for designing groupware that better support collaborative tasks in virtual teams. This literature review explores the factors and challenges associated with collaboration in virtual teams. This paper begins with a review of related LRs in the domain of collaboration in Sect. Sections 5 and 6 explore issues related to distance and other contributing factors, respectively.
Next, in Sect. Prior work includes eight systematic literature reviews surveying various topics related to distance collaboration. These topics fall into two categories: investigations of virtual teams in the domain of distributed software development DSD and explorations of the factors that influence collaboration in broader contexts.
Research into the challenges faced in DSD have resulted in determination of the factors associated with the relationship between distribution, coordination, and team performance that are the most commonly studied in software development, namely dimensions of dispersion e. Several challenges e. Additional work identified opportunities for future research, such as addressing challenges present in multi-organizational software projects and supporting the development of coordination needs and methods over the course of a project [ ].
This category of research also includes a study that classified empirical studies in DSD [ 64 ], revealing that communication warrants further exploration to better support awareness in this context [ ]. These studies are informative and discuss several of the challenges that appear later in this LR e. However, it is not guaranteed that the findings from the DSD studies with regards to these dimensions directly translate to collaboration in another context.
In contrast, this paper examines distance collaboration in all virtual teams. Other studies have studied the factors affecting collaboration in general. Mattessich and Monsey identified 19 factors necessary for successful collaboration, including the ability to compromise, mutual respect and trust, and flexibility [ ]. Similarly, Patel et al.
In contrast to the results of the DSD studies, these findings apply to a broad range of contexts. However, since these literature reviews primarily focus on co-located collaboration, it is difficult to discern how the factors identified by these studies influence virtual teams.
This paper differs by focusing only on virtual teams. Relevant papers were extracted for LR using the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters [ ] for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in software engineering, with the adjustments recommended by Kitchenham and Brereton [ ].
These guidelines divide the review process into three steps:. Planning the review In this step, the research questions and review protocol are defined. This will be discussed in the remainder of Sect.
Conducting the review This step focuses on executing the review protocol created in the previous step. This will also be discussed in Sect. Reporting the review This final step documents, validates, and reports the results of the review. This will be the subject of Sects. This subsection will focus on developing the list of research questions used to generate the list of keywords for extracting papers and specify the search methodology. The first stage of this literature review began by defining research questions using the Goal-Question-Metric approach described by Van Solingen et al.
This model specifies the purpose, object, issue, and viewpoint that comprise a goal, which is then distilled into research questions and used to create metrics for answering those questions. The goal of this LR is:. The purpose of asking question 1 is to outline previous research investigating collaboration challenges. The expected outcome will be a comprehensive view of challenges affecting collaborations and identification of gaps or areas warranting future exploration.
Research Question 1a will be the topic of Sect. Research Question 2, however, focuses on the development of technology for supporting collaboration.
The answers to this question will yield an overview of design implications for the creation of groupware, which will be discussed in Sect. The research questions listed above were used to identify keywords to use as search terms.
This search can be described by the following boolean search query:. Our search methodology used multiple searches as terms were either exhausted or identified by collected papers. The generated search terms were used to conduct searches using Google Scholar since this search engine conducts a meta-search that returns results from several paper repositories such as Science Direct, ResearchGate, Academia.
During the review, it became apparent that after the first 8—9 pages of results, we reached concept saturation. As a result, we limited our search to the first 10 pages for a total of potential sources.
Specifically, collected papers were used to generate additional keywords, identify additional papers through the bibliography, identify newer papers that cited them, and identify authors who had written important papers published in relevant conferences. These authors were searched for using the identified search engines, and all their papers were evaluated for inclusion. In addition, other researchers proposed sources that were used to boost paper extraction.
These additional methods were used because prior work by Greehalgh and Peacock [ 91 ] found that less efficient methods like snowballing are likely to identify important sources that would otherwise be missed, since predefined protocol driven search strategies cannot solely be relied on. The first ten pages of results from Google Scholar were reviewed since occasionally keywords resulted in a high amount of potential papers.
All papers were reviewed from searches resulting in fewer than ten pages of results. As part of our search methodology, we utilized several inclusion and exclusion criteria to filter the collected papers from the potential papers found using the systematic search and snowballing. These inclusion and exclusion factors are listed in Table 1. Figure 1 shows the number of identified papers that met the inclusion criteria across 5-year periods.
To facilitate analysis, the papers identified as part of the LR, shown in Fig. Virtual teams are affected by physical factors such as geographic distance, in addition to temporal and perceive distance, which are time-based and cognitive respectively. These factors are tightly coupled with social and emotional factors, including trust, motivation, and conflicts.
Based on the papers in this literature review, we separate these factors into the categories of distance factors, which include geographical physical , temporal, and perceived distance and contributing factors that are driven by distance including the nature of the work, the presence or need for explicit management, and group composition.
Each category correlates with a set of challenges that greatly affect virtual teams. Distance categories and their associated challenges are discussed in Sect.
Contributing factors are discussed later in Sect. Distance can be categorized as being primarily geographical, temporal, or perceived. Distance categories and their associated challenges are discussed in the following sections to answer Research Question 1a: what factors specific to distance cause challenges that impact distance collaboration? Thus, two physically distant locations could be considered geographically close if they have regular direct flights.
Even a distance as small as 30 meters has been shown to have a profound influence on communication between collaborators [ 4 ]. Furthermore, geographical distance is well known to pose challenges for virtual teams [ ]. Olson and Olson explored these challenges at length in [ ] and [ ]. Their first work compared remote and co-located work through an analysis of more than ten years of laboratory and field research examining synchronous collaborations [ ].
The paper presented a follow-up study that synthesized other prior work [ 78 , ] to expand their contribution [ ]. Findings from both studies identified the following ten challenges that hinder distance work:.
Challenges 1—5 will be discussed in this section while Challenges 6—10 will be topics of interest later in Sect. However, these effects are harder to find and cultivate in remote work, which poses an additional challenge to collaboration.
The cause of these problems is likely because co-located workers have more opportunities for casual encounters and unplanned conversations [ ], which boosts awareness.
Similarly, distance prevents the informal visual observations necessary for maintaining awareness [ 8 ]. This is important since workers use the presence of specific teammates in a shared space to guide their work and prefer to be aware of who is sharing their work space [ 71 ]. Isolation can have an effect as well—when members of a virtual team become more isolated, their contributions and participation with the team decrease [ 32 ].
The importance of awareness in collaboration is discussed at length by Dourish and Bellotti [ 62 ], who investigate awareness through a case study examining ShrEdit [ ], a text editor that supports multiple users synchronously.
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