VOSS: Building Social Attachment in Virtual Groups

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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.