Stress and Coping Due to Global Virtual Teamwork

Global virtual teams (GVTs), project teams composed of individuals working across time and space via electronic platforms, are becoming increasingly commonplace in most organizations today and in global organizations specifically. The aim of this study was to explore issues employees experienced when working virtually in GVTs in order to develop recommendations for addressing those issues and encouraging solutions to benefit the employees, teams, and organizations as a whole. This paper presents findings from 27 interviews on coping and strain reactions to participation in intercultural computer-mediated communication (CMC). Analyses of the qualitative data suggest that intercultural training were helpful in reducing miscommunication and strains or helping individuals to cope (e.g., using problem-focused coping) with strains, although analyses were not statistically significant. In addition to sample size, tenure, experience, and personality might also contribute to few reported negative emotions and the need to actively cope with intercultural CMC stressor. Implications of the findings are discussed

Challenges In Managing Virtual Teams

Many organizations are taking advantage of the opportunities to utilize new technologies to become more effective and efficient.  One of the newer types of approaches to be used is the “virtual team.”  These are teams that are comprised of members who do not work at the same place or even at the same time.  They may be spread across many time zones and may be located all over the world.  These types of teams are made possible by advances in computer-mediated communication and software that allows people to work collaboratively on projects without being co-located or even working at the same time.  Obviously, managing teams of this sort presents many, and sometimes unique, challenges.  This paper addresses these issues, analyzes them, and offers suggestions for relevant management strategies

The curious case of the missing employee in information systems research

ICT has transformed our working lives. The IS discipline has a great deal to contribute to better understand the employee management issues associated with the implementation of new technologies. This paper analyses the IS literature to ascertain the level of research being undertaken in the area of employee management and human resource management. The analysis illustrates that employee management is currently not a key area of research in the mainstream IS discipline. The antecedents as to why there have not been many papers published in this area are many and as yet unstudied. The paper concludes by suggesting future areas of research addressing employee management issues.<br /

Understanding factors affecting the teaching of teamwork in Australian higher education business schools

Integrating teamwork into higher education (HE) curricula has been part of the employability skills agenda for decades. Whilst HE academics have published widely on a variety of strategies utilised to implement teamwork in their teaching, there is little evidence of the interrelated factors associated with teaching teamwork and the paradoxes of critical tension points arising from challenges encountered by educators in their efforts to integrate teamwork in their courses. This thesis explores the salient influences affecting the teaching and learning of teamwork in the Australian HE business school context. The outcomes are presented in a thesis by compilation, which includes the traditional structure of introduction, literature review, methodology, findings/discussion, and conclusion chapters, along with three published articles demonstrating original, primary research. A published global systematic literature review (SLR) identified that temporal, fiscal, psychological, and human resource transaction cost interactions for HE educators, students and institutions affected the uptake of HE teamwork. Interactions are predicated on the way in which educators derive benefits or costs from developing, coordinating, monitoring, participating in, interacting with, and evaluating HE teamwork. Transaction costs, for example, whether to engage with the employability agenda, or provide instruction in team skills, collaborative learning, curriculum design, and assessment of teamwork, represent the return on investment to educators when undertaking the teaching of teamwork. These findings are an original contribution to the HE teamwork literature as there is scant evidence of costs associated with affording or constraining HE teamwork. A second published SLR article was confined to a more rigorous review of the Australian HE teamwork literature. Numerous factors were identified as constraints to HE teamwork, with findings thematically indicating that Australian business discipline educators were mainly concerned with team formation and management, teaching and learning approaches to HE teamwork and challenges influencing teaching and learning practices, thus providing an original contribution to knowledge of the salient issues affecting the teaching and learning of teamwork in the Australian business school context. These findings were used to inform semi-structured interview questions for a case study of business educators from a range of disciplines across four public universities in Australia. Grounded in a social constructivist paradigm, and using the case study approach, findings from 30 qualitative interviews with Australian business educators identified that performative demands on HE educators resulted in a range of critical paradox tension points, highlighting the salient influences contributing to understanding educator factors affecting the teaching of HE teamwork. Specifically focusing on the performativity paradoxes of performing/organising, performing/learning, and performing/belonging, illuminated the lived experience of business educators navigating performativity with HE teamwork and their reactions to critical tension points in their required or perceived performativity. In this thesis the third published article presented in Chapter Five, conceptualises how business school educators negotiated the inherent stresses, conflicts, and tensions in their teaching to understand, react and influence their approaches to HE teamwork. Theoretically, the utility of transaction cost and paradox theories as heuristic conceptual lenses to understand the dynamic interactions for educators’ facilitating the teaching of teamwork is demonstrated. Conceptual understandings are expanded through the application of paradox theory in the educational context, contributing to the advancement of knowledge and/or professional practice acknowledged by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (2018) as a core aspect of HE scholarship. This is a unique feature of this study, generating original contributions to the understanding of the scholarship of teaching and learning in the field of teamwork in the Australian business school context. Implications for theory and practice have wider application within HE and provide a sound basis for the development of teamwork as a requisite skill to satisfy not only the broader aspects of the employability agenda, but also advancement of knowledge in the field which has implications for future research, providing opportunities to broaden the scholarship of teaching and learning as it relates to the functionality of teamwork pedagogy

Differing Impact Levels from Risk Factors on Virtual and Co-Located Software Development Projects

Although software development projects increasingly incorporate virtual team members they still fall prey to risks which produce challenges as do co-located projects. Most research performed on project risk was conducted on projects using traditional co-located team members. This paper reports on the results of a survey of over 150 Information Technology (IT) practitioners. One goal of the survey was to identify differences in the degree of impact between risk factors on virtual software projects and those on co-located software projects. Out of fifty-five surveyed risk factors, seven risk factors showed significant differences in impact on the successful completion of projects in these two types of project environments. Additionally, the results showed a greater impact for each of the seven risk factors on virtual rather than co-located software projects. These results can be useful to practitioners who are managing in a virtual environment and need to correctly identify potential risks

Lidando com o stresse na fronteira final: uma intervenção para reduzir o stresse induzido por voos espaciais

Research in human spaceflight has extensively documented how microgravity environments, such as spaceflight across Low Earth Orbit (LEO), affects astronauts’ and Spaceflight Participants’ emotions. However, a more refined understanding of this topic will become especially relevant as national and international space agencies increase the duration of manned space missions, and as the private sector fully enters the aerospace arena. In this paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the four main types of interventions for dealing with the stressors associated with human spaceflight (i.e., ergonomic, physiological, psychological, and psychosocial), and then elaborate on a psychosocial intervention grounded on evidence-based interventions across several fields of psychological research. Among the components of such interventions, we recommend adopting advanced stress coping strategies, developing emotional and intercultural competencies and crafting a shared social identity among crew members. Our proposed intervention aims to enhance the efficacy of social support as a key coping mechanism and applies to crewmembers and spaceflight participants of diverse cultural backgrounds who, most likely, will work using computer-mediated communication (CMC).Investigações em voos espaciais tripulados documentaram extensivamente como os ambientes de microgravidade, como voos espaciais pela órbita baixa da Terra (OBT), afetam as emoções dos astronautas e dos participantes do Voo Espacial. No entanto, um entendimento mais refinado deste tópico tornar-se-á especialmente relevante, à medida que as agências espaciais nacionais e internacionais aumentem a duração das missões espaciais tripuladas e que o setor privado entre totalmente na arena aeroespacial. Neste artigo, analisamos os pontos fortes e fracos dos quatro principais tipos de intervenções para lidar com os stressores associados ao voo espacial humano (ergonómico, fisiológico, psicológico e psicossocial) e depois desenhamos uma intervenção psicossocial sustentada em intervenções baseadas em evidências realizadas em vários campos da investigação psicológica. Entre os componentes de tais intervenções, recomendamos a adoção de estratégias avançadas para lidar com o stresse, o desenvolvimento de competências emocionais e interculturais e a criação de uma identidade social partilhada entre os membros da tripulação. A nossa proposta de intervenção visa aumentar a eficácia do apoio social como um mecanismo chave para lidar com o stresse e aplica-se a tripulantes e participantes de voos espaciais de diversas origens culturais que, muito provavelmente, irão trabalhar usando comunicação mediada por computador (CMC)

Augmenting Online Learning with Real-Time Conferencing: Experiences from an International Course

This paper reports experiences from the use of real-time conferencing to support synchronous class interaction in an international online course. Through combination of video, audio, application sharing and chat, the students and instructors engaged in weekly interactions in a virtual classroom. This created an environment for rich interaction, augmenting the traditional use of course repositories. Further, this gave the students hands-on experience with real-time conferencing tools which are increasingly common in the workplace. The paper also discusses experienced challenges related to combining the use of multiple synchronous communication channels and presents implications for further use of real-time conferencing in online courses

Coping in the final frontier: An intervention to reduce spaceflight-induced stress

Research in human spaceflight has extensively documented how microgravity environments, such as spaceflight across Low Earth Orbit (LEO), affects astronauts’ and Spaceflight Participants’ emotions. However, a more refined understanding of this topic will become especially relevant as national and international space agencies increase the duration of manned space missions, and as the private sector fully enters the aerospace arena. In this paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the four main types of interventions for dealing with the stressors associated with human spaceflight (i.e., ergonomic, physiological, psychological, and psychosocial), and then elaborate on a psychosocial intervention grounded on evidence-based interventions across several fields of psychological research. Among the components of such interventions, we recommend adopting advanced stress coping strategies, developing emotional and intercultural competencies and crafting a shared social identity among crew members. Our proposed intervention aims to enhance the efficacy of social support as a key coping mechanism and applies to crewmembers and spaceflight participants of diverse cultural backgrounds who, most likely, will work using computer-mediated communication (CMC).Investigações em voos espaciais tripulados documentaram extensivamente como os ambientes de microgravidade, como voos espaciais pela órbita baixa da Terra (OBT), afetam as emoções dos astronautas e dos participantes do Voo Espacial. No entanto, um entendimento mais refinado deste tópico tornar-se-á especialmente relevante, à medida que as agências espaciais nacionais e internacionais aumentem a duração das missões espaciais tripuladas e que o setor privado entre totalmente na arena aeroespacial. Neste artigo, analisamos os pontos fortes e fracos dos quatro principais tipos de intervenções para lidar com os stressores associados ao voo espacial humano (ergonómico, fisiológico, psicológico e psicossocial) e depois desenhamos uma intervenção psicossocial sustentada em intervenções baseadas em evidências realizadas em vários campos da investigação psicológica. Entre os componentes de tais intervenções, recomendamos a adoção de estratégias avançadas para lidar com o stresse, o desenvolvimento de competências emocionais e interculturais e a criação de uma identidade social partilhada entre os membros da tripulação. A nossa proposta de intervenção visa aumentar a eficácia do apoio social como um mecanismo chave para lidar com o stresse e aplica-se a tripulantes e participantes de voos espaciais de diversas origens culturais que, muito provavelmente, irão trabalhar usando comunicação mediada por computador (CMC)

The effect of asynchronous communication on the relationship between intragroup conflicts and transition processes

The aim of this research is to evaluate the effect of asynchronous communication on the relationship between intragroup conflicts and transition processes. Data was collected from 332 respondents with the help of a questionnaire. Results of the moderation analysis showed that asynchronous communication has a significantly negative impact on the association of relationship conflict and transition processes. Even though, the impact of asynchronous communication on the relationship between task conflict and transition processes was not significant. The discussion part focuses on the moderation model and reasons why the negative effect of low synchronous communication might be stronger than the negative effect of high synchronous communication. Implications for real business cases are that transition processes should be seen as important, as they are the basis of successful projects. Moreover, managers should invest in team building in the beginning of every project in order to avoid possible disadvantages, which may arise in teams which communicate from different places and mainly virtual.A tese que se apresenta tem como objetivo a avaliação do efeito da comunicação assíncrona na relação entre conflitos intra-grupais e processos de transição. A recolha de dados foi obtida através de 332 indivíduos entrevistados sob forma de questionário. Os resultados da análise ponderada demonstram que a comunicação assíncrona tem impactos significativamente negativos na associação com conflitos intra-grupais e processos de transição. No entanto, os resultados indicam que o impacto da comunicação assíncrona na relação com o conflito de tarefas e processos de transição não é significativa. Na seção de discussão sobre os resultados, a qual é efetuada com base no modelo de moderação, o enfoque está assente nas razões pelas quais o efeito negativo de fracos níveis comunicação assíncrona poderá ser mais intensa que o efeito negativo de elevados níveis comunicação assíncrona. As implicações deste caso no mundo empresarial têm a ver com a importância dada aos processos de transição, a qual deveria ser elevada, sendo que estes se consideram estar a base de projetos bem-sucedidos. Adicionalmente, os gestores devem investir em ações de atividades em grupo na fase inicial de cada projeto, por forma a eliminar e evitar dificuldades no futuro, as quais são passíveis de surgir em qualquer equipa que comunique de locais diferentes e na maioria por via virtual