Improving Group Communication Outcomes with Collaborative Software: The Impact of Group Size, Media Richness, and Social Presence

Project groups are becoming a mainstay in today’s work environment. This coupled with globalization has distributed many teams. This makes communication among team members vital to project success. This study evaluates the impact of group size and social presence upon group communication. It compares key communication factors for three different social presence treatments (Face-to-Face without CS support; Face-to-Face with CS support; and distributed with CS support). In addition, it evaluates these impacts with two different group sizes. The results indicate that smaller and higher social presence groups maintain higher levels of communication than larger groups and groups with lower social presence. These results should alert project managers to the difficulty of communication between project team members in distributed global environments.

1. INTRODUCTION

The use of groups for projects has become a vital component of today's workplace, especially in light of the globalization of the world's economy. Recent estimates have concluded that group-based work methods exist in nearly 70% of U.S. firms [16]; [27]. Although the use of groups is not new, the use of collaborative systems designed to facilitate and support ongoing group work is a more recent and less common practice [12]. Collaborative work involves sharing ideas, knowledge, competencies, and information to accomplish a task or goal [23].