How Social Media-Enabled Communication Awareness Enhances Project Team Performance

Oliver Krancher, Jens Dibbern, Paul Meyer

    Research output: Journal Article or Conference Article in JournalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    Project teams increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication. In this paper, we propose that communication within these teams benefits from a communication-awareness feature that summarizes communication in one common place. We argue that such a feature pays off specifically during action episodes, when team members engage in taskwork. We conducted two studies of 51 and 35 project teams to examine how the amount of communication during action episodes relates to team performance under low- versus high-communication awareness. In both studies, we technologically designed communication awareness as the availability of a feed, known from social media platforms, that displays all team-internal, computer-mediated communication. The results show that the communication-awareness feature makes communication during action episodes more beneficial, both in term of effectiveness and efficiency. Zooming into the temporal patterns of communication during action episodes further reveals that high-performing teams in the high-communication-awareness condition stand out in terms of early and steady communication. We conclude by discussing implications for current and future research on team communication and awareness support.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalJournal of the Association for Information Systems
    Volume19
    Issue number9
    Pages (from-to)813-856
    Number of pages44
    ISSN1536-9323
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018

    Keywords

    • Team communication
    • team episodes
    • awareness systems
    • communication awareness
    • social media platforms
    • team performance

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