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Conceptualizing the Awareness of Collaboration: A Qualitative Study of a Global Virtual Team

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Abstract

Innovative organizations are increasing their use of distributed teamwork, but there are several difficulties in reaching shared understanding between the team members in these settings. A lack of awareness of other team members’ working processes is one of the drawbacks that a virtual team may face while attempting to collaborate on a shared task. In this study virtual teamwork was supported with a specific working model. The aim was to investigate virtual team members’ awareness of collaboration. One global team (N=19) within a single organization worked as a distributed team in a shared web-based workspace for three months. The data were gathered by means of questionnaires, log-files of the shared virtual workspace and collected company documents in order to find out how team members perceive their collaboration. Based on qualitative data analysis, three different aspects of collaboration awareness were identified: an awareness of the possibility for collaboration, an awareness of the aims of collaboration, and an awareness of the process of collaboration. The results presented in this paper give guidelines for discussing what the awareness of collaboration means in the context of distributed collaboration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit for Educational Technology, Department of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Piritta Leinonen

  2. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Sanna Järvelä

  3. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Päivi Häkkinen

Authors
  1. Piritta Leinonen
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  2. Sanna Järvelä
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  3. Päivi Häkkinen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Piritta Leinonen.

Appendices

Appendix A

The post-questionnaire of the Induction process project.

  1. 1.

    To recall the Induction process project, could you please describe your working process in this project. What did you do first, with whom did you especially collaborate, etc.?

  2. 2.

    What is your opinion about working with this virtual work environment?

  3. 3.

    According to your experience, how beneficial are the collaborative virtual working projects? If you think they are beneficial, why? If not, why?

  4. 4.

    It is known that working in a shared virtual environment like Discendum Optima is demanding and sometimes some members of teams have hardly visited the workspace. What do you think – what could be the reason for this, or what were your reasons?

  5. 5.

    What was difficult for you when you were working as a team member in this virtual work environment?

  6. 6.

    What was difficult for you especially in the Induction process project? Why?

  7. 7.

    Did you follow the steps of the process? If you did, what were your experiences of them?

  8. 8.

    And finally, could you please give five arguments for the use of shared virtual working environment in your organization? Why it should/should not be used?

Appendix B

The procedure of the inductive category development (cf. Mayring, 2000).

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Leinonen, P., Järvelä, S. & Häkkinen, P. Conceptualizing the Awareness of Collaboration: A Qualitative Study of a Global Virtual Team. Comput Supported Coop Work 14, 301–322 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-005-9002-z

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