Are Virtual Teams Less Suited to Men than Women?
I was reading a paper today by Emmeline de Pillis and Kimberly Furumo that considered the hypothesis that men are more likely to be “deadbeats” on a virtual team than women. Deadbeats are described a “free riders” – people who are content to take credit for a group effort without doing any work.
They carried out an experiment with 201 people who were randomly assigned to either a face-to-face or virtual team of three people. They were trying to show that virtual teams have less cohesion than face-to-face teams and also that virtual teams have a higher percentage of non-contributing members (these were described as either deserters or deadbeats). Their results did show that there is less cohesion, less satisfaction, more time spent on a task, and more deadbeats within a virtual team. Most of the deadbeats were male but their results didn’t have statistical significance. The only deserters were male but again this didn’t have statistical significance.
I was aware that most studies show less cohesion in new virtual teams but I hadn’t really thought about gender issues. I’m going to have to read more papers on this area because Pillis and Furumo believe that virtual work is a particularly poor fit for the average male student. This concerns me. Most of the virtual teams I’m aware of are in the I.T. industry and they are predominately male. I want to know what it is about men that makes it harder for them to work in this environment and what can be done to improve their experience.
June 6th, 2007 at 10:34 am
When I left NewWork for NewNewWork, they offered me working-from-home virtual teamery.
I considered it, and considered it not for me. I didn’t feel it was something I could do. (Actually, I don’t think I could work from home. Oh, right, for a pile of cash I could probably put up with it.)
I like *real* interaction. Sure, sitting on IRC with cow-orkers is fine, but I feel the need to see (and not via a videolink) people. To actually interact with the chicks down the other end of the office. Having done a video conference on a project I am working on, then having a meeting face-to-face with said-same people, so much more got done when we were working in the same physical location. Although that was just a meeting, not the project. As they talk about it, and I get to do the work.
So out of a sample of me, I would prefer not to be in a virtual team. I would also prefer not to be a deadbeat, but that is something else.
(And hey! I am enjoying your recent (more frequent-than-before) output. Even if there isn’t enough what-makeup-I-bought-in-Japanaland-type posts.)
June 6th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
A reference to the paper would be lovely 🙂
June 7th, 2007 at 6:43 am
A reference would indeed be sensible 🙂
I read lots of papers via the ACM’s digital archive which I believe is for subsribers only – so I don’t usually bother putting in a link to those references.
The paper was called “Virtual vs. face-to-face teams: deadbeats, deserters, and other considerations” and was published in April 2006 as part of the Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future SIGMIS CPR ’06. The authors were Emmeline de Pillis and Kimberly Furumo.
June 9th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Thanks 🙂
I’ve been digging into the advantages of co-located teams recently so it’s appreciated.