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Increasing globalization has created tremendous opportunities and challenges for organizations and societies. Consequently, a broad range of information technologies to better support the collaboration of diverse, and increasingly distributed, sets of participants is ever more utilized. Arguably, the success of such technology-mediated collaboration is dependent upon the quality of each individual's contributions; however, although individuals' motivations to do their best could be significantly influenced by the design of a system's human-computer interface, this area has received little attention within the context of group collaboration environments. We fill this gap by integrating research from human-computer interaction, motivation, and technology-supported group work to theoretically derive mechanisms for increasing each individual's motivation within a collective setting. Specifically, we manipulate the interface of a computer-mediated idea generation system (a widely used collaboration tool) to enhance the system's motivational affordance, i.e., the system's properties that fulfill users' motivational needs. Results from two studies demonstrate that by embedding the theoretically derived mechanisms \"providing feedback\" and \"designing for optimal challenge\" into the collaboration environment, significant performance gains were realized. The results suggest that even slight manipulations of the human-computer interface can contribute significantly to the successful design of a wide variety of group collaboration environments.

Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and behavioral norms. We suggest that an equally important trust mechanism is \"reflected knowledge,\" knowledge that workers gain about the personal characteristics, relationships, and behavioral norms of their own site through the lens of their distant collaborators. Based on surveys gathered from 140 employees in a division of a global chemical company, we found that direct knowledge and reflected knowledge enhanced trust in distinct ways. Although both enhanced feelings of closeness with others, results indicate that direct knowledge increased focal actors' understanding of their distant colleagues, whereas reflected knowledge promoted feelings of being understood. We discuss implications of reflected knowledge to theories of trust and interpersonal dynamics in globally distributed collaboration. This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.

This paper posits the idea that conversations about public services encourage society participation in public issues and establish closer ties between society and government service providers. It is argued that by making society aware of how a service is provided – its process - citizens (clients) may develop a better attitude for interacting with government and other service users, by discussing problems, correcting previously-available information, increasing their knowledge about the processes. This paper presents a tool designed to support conversations about public service processes and the results obtained with a case study of its use. The results suggest that conversations have stimulated interaction among citizens and government services providers as well as allowed identification of service improvement opportunities.

Virtual teams have been adopted by organizations to gain competitive advantages in this global economy. This study investigated the factors that facilitate trust in virtual teams. Both structural and process variables, including task interdependence, media use, and awareness of teammates' activities, were proposed to influence trust development in distributed work groups. To test our hypotheses, 7 virtual engineering design teams were recruited from universities in the United States, Mexico, and Russia. Each team consisted of students from 2 locations and was offered a set of communication tools, including video conferencing systems, telephone, fax, a project-specific email account, and a web-based groupware tool. The results showed that perceived task interdependence and communication frequency had positive effects on perceived level of awareness. Additionally, both perceived task interdependence and awareness were positively associated with trust. Further analysis showed that perceived awareness mediated the relationship between perceived task interdependence and trust. These results suggest that awareness is an important group process variable linking task structure and trust in virtual teams. The implications of the results on virtual team management were discussed.

With the growing popularity of mobile technologies and the increasing use of groups within organizations, it is important to understand the collaboration contexts where mobile collaboration technologies (MCTs) are essential. This is especially critical given the high cost associated with the acquisition and implementation of MCTs and the need to make an informed decision regarding the appropriateness of MCTs. In this paper, the authors address this issue by first drawing on real life-based collaboration scenarios and examining the technology requirements of groups; second, comparing the features offered by MCTs with those of FTF and two types of CMCTs; third, proposing a collaboration environment-technology fit perspective in realizing optimal usage of a collaboration technology; and fourth, creating the Group Collaboration Technology Repertoire Grid, which maps the “ideal” collaboration technology(s) repertoire for each type of collaboration environment. The grid highlights the collaboration environments that would need MCTs and provides managers or organizational group leaders the ability to map their collaboration environments into a specific category and thus more easily decide on the particular collaboration technology repertoire that would be most beneficial.

Recent research has proposed that groupware performance may be strongly affected by the fit between the task and the groupware structures selected for use. We suggest that the link is deeper; there needs to be a fit between the task and the group’s cognitive structures as mapped to the groupware structures. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by integrating recent theories of cognition (distributed cognition, transactive memory, and template theory) from the perspective of electronic collaboration. We refine the concept of cognitive fit as applied to group work and offer propositions for further study. We suggest that template core data is used during situation assessment and that slot data refines response selection. Finally, we propose several techniques by which the group cognitive effort can be minimized, thereby leaving more capacity for the collective task. This approach is especially applicable to naturalistic group decision situations.

Like many terms that have spawned around the Internet, web collaboration can be a mystery even to technology practitioners. When referring to collaboration on a business activity, there are generally two buckets for these processes. The first are activities that would fit within the process of innovation. The second bucket includes the activities around executing the business processes. People heard expressions like business at the speed of light or the zero latency enterprise. These are all about business becoming faster, cheaper and better. Collaboration has not only been enabled by the web, but has been driving much of this technology evolution. In some cases, mega-communities have been enabled by this technology. Electronic commerce expanded beyond simple ordering. Now many companies execute many key processes through web collaboration. Another emerging area of how web collaboration is impacting execution is through business intelligence networks. Globalization has probably been the most visible area where web collaboration has enabled new business innovation.