VOSS: Building Social Attachment in Virtual Groups

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。科学和工程工作越来越多地由相互依赖的人组成的团队在组织内部和跨组织的不同时间和地点完成。先前的研究表明，对于这些“虚拟”的成员来说，这尤其困难。团队变得依恋或致力于他们的团队。缺乏承诺反过来会导致冲突，减少信息共享和贡献，更高的流动率和糟糕的团队绩效。这项研究的目的是为了更好地理解如何在虚拟环境中培养对群体的依恋。我们建议可以设计虚拟群组来增强成员的能力。基于bond或基于identity的attachment。在以纽带为基础的依恋中，成员通过与其他成员的人际关系与群体联系在一起，而在以身份为基础的依恋中，群体成员将群体使命、主题或定义特征纳入他们对自己是谁的认识中。我们将通过在Facebook上创建许多游戏群组，进行一系列在线实验，在虚拟环境中检验依恋关系。这些实验将改变理论预测的群体特征，这些特征将促进基于纽带和基于身份的依恋，并检查对人员流动、贡献、成员对成员的支持、小组内的任务表现、友谊关系、小组外的沟通以及对小组及其成员的自我报告的依恋的影响。这些参数化的实验研究将辅以一系列在公民科学家社区进行的实地实验，如？eBird.org,？一个在线社区，观鸟者在其中报告鸟类的地理和时间分布。在这些实地实验中，我们将引入Facebook实验中成功促进依恋的功能，以确定如何结合和磨练一套社区设计功能，以增加依恋和贡献。本研究将扩展我们对虚拟团队社会动态的理解，对组织行为学和信息系统等领域有所贡献。此外，它将产生设计虚拟团队的实用建议，并将改进它们，从而导致人机交互领域的进步。总体而言，本研究将提高虚拟组织的有效性。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Science and engineering work is increasingly accomplished by teams of interdependent people performing at different times and places within and across organizations. Prior research shows that it is particularly difficult for members of these ?virtual? teams to become attached or committed to their group. Lack of commitment in turn can lead to conflict, decreased information sharing and contribution, higher rates of turnover and poor team performance. The goal of this research is to better understand how to foster attachment to a group in a virtual setting. We propose that one can design virtual groups to enhance members? bond-based or identity-based attachment. With bond-based attachment members are connected to the group through interpersonal relationships with other members while with identity-based attachment group members incorporate the group mission, theme or defining characteristics into their sense of who they are. We will examine attachment in a virtual setting by conducting a series of online experiments, creating numerous game groups on Facebook. These experiments will vary features of the groups that theory predicts will promote bond-based and identity-based attachment, and examine the impact on turnover, contributions, member-to-member support, task performance within the group, friendship ties, communication outside the group, and self-reported attachment to the group and its members. These parametric, experimental studies will be complemented with a series of field experiments conducted in citizen-scientist communities like ?eBird.org,? an online community in which bird watchers report on the geographic and temporal distribution of bird species. In these field experiments we will introduce features that the Facebook experiments showed successfully promoted attachment in order to determine how to combine and hone a set of community-design features to increase attachment and contribution. This research will extend our understanding of social dynamics in virtual teams, contributing to the fields of organizational behavior and information systems. In addition, it will result in practical recommendations for designing virtual teams will improve them, leading to advances in the field of human-computer interaction. Overall, this research will improve the effectiveness of virtual organizations.