7 research outputs found
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Brainwriting in virtual legislative sessions
Many studies have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of using group support systems in large, face-to-face meetings known as legislative sessions. However, few have investigated how individual participants or sub-groups in different rooms linked via a computer network, forming a virtual group, may use the systems. An experiment using two sizes of virtual groups (8 and 16 participants) showed that participants were satisfied with the meeting process. In addition, there were no significant differences in five process and outcome variables between the two sizes of groups, indicating that an upper limit on the size of the virtual groups had not been reached
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A comparison of performance and satisfaction between two types of group decision support systems
Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) and other electronic meeting technologies have been developed to support or replace traditional, verbal meetings. While extensive research has been conducted regarding the impact of these systems on the group decision making process, the vast majority of these studies have focused on groups meeting fact-to-face in one room. This paper focuses on how group members perform when distributed as non-proximate sub-groups (virtual legislative sessions) as compared to proximate, face-to-face groups (synchronous legislative sessions). Experiments involving 12 groups of 10 members each showed that there were few significant differences in productivity and satisfaction between the two types of meeting formats. These and other results indicate that groups may operate productively in a virtual meeting environment
Transterpreting Multilingual Electronic Meetings
Communicating in a non-native language during a traditional, oral meeting is difficult, but a Group Support System (GSS) along with online machine translation (MT) can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the discussion. An experimental study shows that a group facilitator can use a Web-based translation service to support a multilingual meeting, but completely automated language support is likely to be more efficient for large groups.
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The Temporal Dimension of Electronic Meetings: A Study of Synchronous and Asynchronous Idea Generation
Electronic meeting systems can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of group discussions, but relatively little research has investigated use of the technology in asynchronous environments. In this study, five groups of 10 students participated in synchronous legislative sessions and five groups of 10 met in asynchronous settings. Results showed that there were no differences in meeting process satisfaction, production blocking, evaluation apprehension, and total and relevant comments generated, but synchronous groups believed there was more participation and were more satisfied with the comments. Although there could be less feeling of social presence, use of asynchronous, distributed meetings might become more prevalent as groups seek to reduce travel
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Electronic Facilitation of Large Meetings
Many meetings involve large groups exchanging oral comments in a face-to-face environment, yet few studies have investigated how electronic facilitation can benefit these discussions. In this paper, we studied two large oral meetings (group sizes of 38 and 37) and two computer-based meetings (group sizes 33 and 35). Results show that, as in smaller groups, members of electronic meetings experience less production blocking and evaluation apprehension and generate more total comments, relevant comments, and words per comment. However, contradicting prior research, participants in the oral meetings were more satisfied with the process
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Creativity in a 24h-long virtual design team
Creativity has traditionally constituted an important topic in organizations and its importance seems to have increased as we have been moving from traditional, physically collocated to virtual, geographically dispersed team configurations. Our study aims to bridge this gap by examining the case of creativity in virtual design teams (VDTs)—that is, virtual teams in the context of engineering design. We see design as a collaborative activity and use it as the empirical context in this study. We report on the findings from a case study with a temporary, 24h-long, VDT, which examined the relationship between creativity and virtuality. We employed multiple data collection methods, capturing most of the 24h, (i.e. interviews, non-participant observation, videos, design outputs, written communications), and analysed our data thematically following an interpretive approach and by using the ‘team’ as our unit of analysis. Our study extends prior knowledge on creativity in virtual teams by (a) positioning creativity within the VDT lifecycle; and by (b) elucidating the relationship between creativity and the unique characteristics of virtuality. We infer that boundaries, language, geographical dispersion, subgrouping, and computer-mediated communication are associated with creativity in the VDT context; and explain how they influence it
Identifying Quality, Novel, and Creative Ideas: Constructs and Scales for Idea Evaluation
Researchers and practitioners have an abiding interest in improving tools and methods to support idea generation. In studies that go beyond merely enumerating ideas, researchers typically select one or more of the following three constructs, which are often operationalized as the dependent variable(s): 1) idea quality, 2) idea novelty, which is sometimes referred to as rarity or unusualness, and 3) idea creativity. It has been chronically problematic to compare findings across studies because these evaluation constructs have been variously defined and the constructs have been sampled in different ways. For example, some researchers term an idea \u27creative\u27 if it is novel, while others consider an idea to be creative only if it is also applicable, effective, and implementable. This paper examines 90 studies on creativity and idea generation. Within the creativity studies considered here, the novelty of ideas was always measured, but in some cases the ideas had to also meet additional requirements to be considered creative. Some studies that examined idea quality also assessed novelty, while others measured different quality attributes, such as effectiveness and implementability, instead. This paper describes a method for evaluating ideas with regard to four dimensions--novelty, workability, relevance, and specificity--and has identified two measurable sub-dimensions for each of the four main dimensions. An action-research approach was used to develop ordinal scales anchored by clearly differentiable descriptions for each sub-dimension. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed high loadings among the sub-dimensions that comprise each dimension as well as high discriminant validity between dimensions. Application of this method resulted in high inter-rater reliability even when the method was applied by different raters to different problems and to ideas produced by both manual methods and group support systems (GSS)