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Facilitating interpersonal evaluation of knowledge in a context of distributed team collaboration

This study investigates how distributed team members evaluate their own and others’ knowledge when they engage in goal-directed activities and seek shared understanding. Twenty-three manager-level employees of a municipal organisation worked as two distributed teams for two months. Their work was supported with a visualisation tool, which was embedded in the teams’ shared www-based workspaces. After the distributed working period, the subjects were interviewed and their work in the shared workspace was traced. Qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that, in distributed collaboration, individuals use both self-evaluation and interpersonal evaluation strategies when trying to gain an awareness of others’ knowledge. The interpersonal evaluations included strategies such as assessing the expertise and knowledge of others. It is concluded that when individuals do not have situational information, eg, what others think about the content of the shared task, they tend to make personal attributions. In other words, their evaluations of the others’ knowledge focus on stable tendencies like the expertise of other individuals.