The Science of Teamwork

Provocative article on Scientific American Mind, re: teamwork and how to develop it.

In the face of productivity-enhancing technologies, could it be that human factors are one of the biggest potential growth areas?

We recently reviewed the past 50 years of research literature on teams and identified factors that characterize the best collaborations. It turns out that what team members think, feel and do provide strong predictors of team success—and these factors also suggest ways to design, train and lead teams to help them work even better.

Interesting Observation - it seems that meeting in person is extremely important:

In an interesting twist, organizational behavior expert Kyle Lewis of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin found that the development of a team's ability to access distributed knowledge required face-to-face interaction. In groups that communicated exclusively by phone or e-mail, this skill did not emerge—an observation of increasing importance, given the rise of teams that operate remotely and coordinate sometimes only through computer interactions. It should prompt concerted efforts to understand the reasons for such barriers and explore whether web-cams, videoconferencing or other technologies that allow people to interact will help overcome this problem. For now, the best solution may be to guarantee some face time for team members throughout their project.

So - what does this mean for Virtual teams? How can we close the communication gap when we can't be in the same room?

Does Virtual Reality help or hinder this process?

[posted with ecto]