The myth of spontaneous connection : an ethnographic study of the situated nature of virtual teamwork

Abstract

This thesis reports the findings of an exploratory 23-month multi-site participant-observation study of one multi-organizational virtual team in the automotive industry. Observing and interacting with the team members in their local work sites and in team meetings, I investigated the influence of virtual team members' situation in their respective local work contexts on the work, communication, and participation patterns observed at the team level. I found that the team members' local work worlds directly influenced both their capacity and their incentive to contribute to the team. In addition, I found that the participation patterns observed at the team level reflected, in large part, the unintended cumulative consequence of the members' respective locally-advantageous strategies for responding to local events and conditions. Using Giddens' structuration theory, I show how the members' consistent application of these local world management strategies under changing local circumstances accounts for contrasting participation patterns observed at the team level between the first and second years of the study. The thesis contributes to the virtual team literature by extending the analytic focus to include virtual team members' local work contexts, bringing to light aspects of virtual collaboration that have heretofore been largely matters of speculation and, consequently, opening new avenues for further research.