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Expanding the Bandwidth of Virtual Teams Via a Shared Social Construction

Computer-mediated communication systems (CMC) offer alternative means of communication within and across organisational contexts. Collaboration between virtual teams which meet via computer-mediated technologies, often takes place in a context where the teams are geographically distributed and the members in the teams have not met in a face-to-face meeting. In this context promoting effective communication using CMC is a fundamental issue for managers and researchers alike. Prior studies have found that CMC technologies could be used as effectively as face-to-face meetings for group decision making providing group members have the opportunity to build up a shared common understanding. However, CMC does not currently facilitate building a shared basis for effective communication among group members. This paper proposes that a theory-based framework can be adopted to help group members build such a common understanding for effective communication in a CMC environment. Results from an experiment show that groups that used this framework had better group decision outcomes than those that did not in both a face-to-face and a videoconferencing environment. Videoconferencing can be used as effectively as face-to-face meetings for group decision satisfaction. Videoconferencing groups demonstrated greater improvement in group outcomes by using the framework. Therefore, the dialogue technique appears to be a useful framework for group members, especially virtual teams, to build a common understanding and consequently work more effectively via CMC technologies.