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在不同时间和地点在组织内部和组织之间执行任务的相互依赖的人员组成的团队完成。先前的研究表明，这是特别困难的成员，这些？虚拟？使团队变得依恋或致力于他们的团队。缺乏承诺反过来又会导致冲突、信息共享和贡献减少、人员流动率上升和团队绩效低下。本研究的目的是更好地了解如何在虚拟环境中培养对群体的依恋。我们建议，可以设计虚拟组，以提高成员？基于键或基于身份的连接。在基于纽带的依恋中，成员通过与其他成员的人际关系与群体联系在一起，而在基于身份的依恋中，群体成员将群体的使命、主题或定义特征纳入他们的自我意识中。我们将通过一系列在线实验，在Facebook上创建许多游戏组，在虚拟环境中研究依恋。这些实验将改变理论预测将促进债券为基础的和基于身份的附件组的功能，并检查营业额的影响，贡献，成员对成员的支持，在组内的任务性能，友谊关系，组外的通信，和自我报告的附件组及其成员。这些参数，实验研究将补充一系列的现场实验进行公民科学家社区，如？eBird.org，？一个在线社区，鸟类观察者在其中报告鸟类的地理和时间分布。 在这些现场实验中，我们将介绍Facebook实验中成功促进依恋的功能，以确定如何联合收割机和磨练一套社区设计功能来增加依恋和贡献。这项研究将扩展我们对虚拟团队中社会动力学的理解，有助于组织行为和信息系统领域。此外，它将导致设计虚拟团队的实际建议将改善他们，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.