Design and Impact of Awareness Functions – A Study about Social Media in Virtual Teams

The usage of social media in leisure time settings has become a prominent research topic. However, less research has been done on the design of social media in collaboration settings. In this study, we investigate how social media can support asynchronous collaboration in virtual teams and specifically how they can increase activity awareness. On the basis of an open source social networking platform, we present two prototype designs: a standard platform with basic support for information processing, communication and process – as suggested by Zigurs and Buckland (1998) – and an advanced platform with additional support for activity awareness via specialfeed functions. We argue that the standard platform already conveys activity awareness to a certain extent, however, that this awareness can be increased even more by the feeds in the advanced platform. Both prototypes are tested in a field experiment and evaluated with respect to their impact on perceived activity awareness, coordination and satisfaction. We show that the advanced design increases coordination and satisfaction through increased perceived activity awareness.

Efficient team actions: Outline of a theory of teams in sport

So far, social psychology in sport has preliminary focused on team cohesion, and many studies and meta analyses tried to demonstrate a relation between cohesiveness of a team and it's performance. How a team really co-operates and how the individual actions are integrated towards a team action is a question that has received relatively little attention in research. This may, at least in part, be due to a lack of a theoretical framework for collective actions, a dearth that has only recently begun to challenge sport psychologists. In this presentation a framework for a comprehensive theory of teams in sport is outlined and its potential to integrate the following presentations is put up for discussion. Based on a model developed by von Cranach, Ochsenbein and Valach (1986), teams are information processing organisms, and team actions need to be investigated on two levels: the individual team member and the group as an entity. Elements to be considered are the task, the social structure, the information processing structure and the execution structure. Obviously, different task require different social structures, communication and co-ordination. From a cognitivist point of view, internal representations (or mental models) guide the behaviour mainly in situations requiring quick reactions and adaptations, were deliberate or contingency planning are difficult. In sport teams, the collective representation contains the elements of the team situation, that is team task and team members, and of the team processes, that is communication and co-operation. Different meta-perspectives may be distinguished and bear a potential to explain the actions of efficient teams. Cranach, M. von, Ochsenbein, G., & Valach, L. (1986).The group as a self-active system: Outline of a theory of group action. European Journal of Social Psychology, 16, 193-229.