Keywords

1 Introduction

Teamwork, usually defined as multiple people interacting with each other over a period of time to achieve a common goal (Carlos et al. 2015), is of fundamental importance to the operations and success of organizations and permeates almost all facets of today’s professional organization landscape (O’Neill and Salas 2018). Traditionally, teamwork has been studied within the context of human communication in a physical environment within close proximity (Goldense 2017). However, the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) and the resultant increasing globalization have necessitated the evolution of organization structure and operation frameworks for teamwork. As a result, all aspects of teamwork need to adapt to the emerging digitization of the global society (Han et al. 2017), and the deployment of virtual teams “is recognized by organizations and researchers to meet many of these facets of societal and technological evolutions” (Großer and Baumöl 2017).

In this research we adopt the definition of “Virtual Teams” by Schweitzer and Duxbury (2010) as “teams whose members do not share a common workspace all of the time, and must therefore collaborate using information and communication technology (ICT) tools”. We investigate how a collaborative virtual environment can affect the factors that determine team dynamics. We propose comparative studies between physical teamwork and virtual teamwork. In this study, our virtual team environment is represented by audio and visual signal communications (e.g., video conferencing).

The interests in leadership in teams are growing in scholarship and practitioners alike (Carson et al. 2007; Mehra et al. 2006; Morgeson et al. 2010). While abundant research has covered the various aspects of virtual teams and their performance, we notice that there is scant amount of investigation into the comparison and contrast of teamwork in physical teams versus teamwork in virtual teams. There are fundamental differences between these two types of teamwork format milieu. For example, in the physical environment teams are better at reading each other’s emotional display, which is a good indicator of team conflict (Mallen et al. 2003). However, in the virtual environment the virtual distance between individuals generates chasm in understandings (Berry 2011). Physical distance creates psychological distance too.

More specifically, two factors in team collaboration are of specific interests in our study: team psychological safety and team creativity. Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson 1999). According to Edmondson (1999), this factor “is meant to suggest … a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. This confidence stems from mutual respect and trust among team members”; and “team psychological safety involves but goes beyond interpersonal trust; it describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves”. Team creativity, based on Amabile’s (1983) conceptualization of creativity, refer to the degree to which the team’s output is judged to be “(a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct, or valuable response to the task at hand and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic”.

Teams operate differently in face-to-face environment and virtual environment. Literature shows that when people collaborate in a virtual environment, they are less likely to form a trust or mutual beneficial bond among team members. Statistical analyses indicate that psychological safety is an integral indicator of building trust, creating a climate for effective team learning, which leads to team creativity in both collaborative environments (face-to-face and virtual). For example, Kessel et al. (2012) found the connection between psychological safety within the team and creative team performance when sharing information and know-how from 73 teams (face-to-face). Recent scholars have explored the possible mediating role of psychological safety on the effect of organizational factors on team creativity. Examining the relationship between subordinates and supervisors in a team environment, Javed et al. (2017) found that when a psychological safety climate was created and protected by the team, inclusive leadership is positively related with creativity. Many other studies also corroborated the link between psychology safety and team creativity in various kinds of teams, including health care teams, engineering teams, multi-cultural teams, and industrial teams (Hu et al. 2018; Lenberg and Feldt 2018; Kennel et al. 2017; Paulus et al. 2016). However, no study has been done to investigate how the relationships between team psychological safety and team creativity would be affected by the mode of the meeting.

Another aspect of team dynamics that could be significantly affected by the mode of meeting is team member interaction. Since the purpose of a team is to work together to achieve a common goal, the team members’ roles and functionalities become highly correlated and interdependent, and thus necessitate effective interactions (Hambley et al. 2007). Laura et al. (2006) also pointed out that team members’ interactions would best be studies “in terms of the communication patterns used to deal with task conflicts and maintenance of team member relationships”. Again, there are scant studies to address the impact of meeting mode on the team members’ interactions.

These are the gaps in the current literature that this study intends to fill. More specifically, in this study, we want to address the following research questions:

  1. 1.

    What are the impacts of mode of meeting (i.e., physical meeting vs. virtual meeting) on the relationship between team psychological safety and team creativity?

  2. 2.

    What are the impacts of mode meeting on team member interactions?

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: we present our research model in Sect. 2; we describe our study design in Sect. 3, followed by data analysis and discussion in Sect. 4. We conclude in Sect. 5.

2 Research Model

Summarizing our explanation in Sect. 1, we now illustrate our research model as in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Research model

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Our research question 1 is represented by arrow 1, and research question 2 is represented by arrow 2.

3 Study Description

The study involved 27 participants (male = 17 and female = 10). Some descriptive statistics for the participants are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Participant descriptive statistics.
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Participants were recruited through university listservs and were scheduled on a first come first serve basis. A within-subjects design was adopted for this study where all participants were grouped and experienced a face-to-face condition and a virtual condition (e.g., video conferencing with Zoom) in the same session. Face-to-face and virtual environment conditions were counterbalanced to determine which condition each group would experience first. Groups were created based on participant availability with the least being 3 people per group and the most being 4 people. Participants were assigned the task of discussing a solution for two global issues, the global water shortage and global warming, for 25 min. These topics were also counterbalanced to determine which topic would be discussed first. Participants were asked at the end of their discussion to present their idea to a researcher. All sessions were audio and video recorded.

The study lasted approximately 1 h and 30 min. The protocol for the study was as follows: i.) Participants were given a consent form to review and sign, after signing participants were debriefed on the purpose of the study; ii.) Then a researcher played a short clip of how to be an effective team member for participants; iii.) Followed by instructions on the study task, which was to discuss a solution for a global issue (i.e., water shortage in the world or climate change); iv.) After instructions were given if the first condition was a face-to-face interaction the researcher would turn on all recording devices, remind participants the allotted time and exit the room. If the first condition was the virtual environment interaction a researcher would divide the group into separate rooms with a laptop prepared for the participant to log into Zoom for a video conference, remind participants the allotted time and begin recording the Zoom session; v.) After the 25 min was up a researcher would reenter the room, or Zoom room, for the group’s final solution presentation; vi.) Participants were then given a post survey, debriefed and able to leave.

4 Data Analyses and Discussions

4.1 For Research Question 1

Results from CLPM.

Since we are studying two variables (i.e., team psychological safety and team creativity) that are measured at two occasions (i.e., face-to-face meeting and virtual meeting). We thus constructed a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) to study the association of the two variables with each other over the two occasions. The CLPM results are presented in the following Fig. 2.

This cross-lagged panel shows correlations between the two factors, psychological safety and team creativity in two different times (i.e. face-to-face and virtual environments). Our study found that team creativity in face-to-face environment influenced team psychological safety in virtual environment (B = −0.157, p = 0.003). This result indicates that the higher the team creativity the team members perceived from face-to-face meeting, the lower the psychological safety they perceive in the virtual environment. This result is in alignment with the traditional findings in literature that trust, of which psychological safety is a critical indicator, in the virtual environment is harder to establish than in the physical environment. With all the technological advancement, people seem to be still learning to feel comfortable in virtual environment.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Results of multi-group CLPM. (Note: Values are standardized path coefficients. Model fit for the full sample (N = 27))

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It is also found that psychological safety and team creativity at virtual environment are significantly and positively correlated to these two factors during the face-to-face meeting. This result can be interpreted as that, the higher the psychological safety (team creativity) perceived by the team members during face-to-face meeting, the higher the psychological safety (team creativity) will be perceived during virtual meetings (B = 1.087, p < 0.001, and B = 1.015, p < 0.001, respectively). Since these factors in face-to-face environment are positively correlated to them in virtual environment, it implies that the measures we can take to improve team psychological safety and team creativity in the face-to-face environment may also be taken in the virtual environment to improve virtual teams’ team psychological safety and team creativity.

Other correlations studied using CLPM did not yield any additional significant results. We believe one of the reason is the sample size (a total of 27 participants in 8 teams).

Results from T-test.

We also ran t-test to compare the values of measurement of team psychological safety, as well as those of team creativity, in face-to-face environment vs in virtual environment.

For team psychological safety, the result is shown in the following Table 2.

Table 2. Comparison of team psychological safety in two environment.
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For team creativity, the results is shown in the following Table 3.

Table 3. Comparison of team creativity in two environment.
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From these results, we notice that our data indicate in general, team creativity as perceived by the team members is lower in virtual environment than that in face-to-face environment. This result conform with our results from the CLPM that people are still getting used to collaborating in virtual environment, and virtual meeting service providers have much potential and opportunities in helping people to achieve more effective virtual collaborations. The lack of significance in the comparison of team psychological safety, may stem from, among others, the limited sample size of our experiment.

4.2 For Research Question 2

One suitable tool to use in studying our research question 2 would be Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA allows researchers to examine and visualize relational information (Han et al. 2016). SNA is particularly useful when exploring large networks (McCubbins 2016), it may provide useful insight into smaller networks as well. Networks that are visualized through SNA software can provide a deeper qualitative understanding that could be more challenging to obtain quantitatively (Borgatti et al. 2013).

As part of our study, we sought to collect social interaction data through a sociometric questionnaire. Participants were asked to rate their level of interaction with other members on their team. This data was then used to create an adjacency matrix to run SNA statistical procedures within UCINET, a SNA software (Borgatti et al. 2002). While the analysis of the networks did not provide use with a deeper qualitative understanding of the networks, Table 4 summarizes the descriptive statistics of the Face-to-Face and Virtual Meeting networks. The small size of the teams in the study design, and the resulting networks created, prevented a more robust analysis of the resulting Face-to-Face and Virtual Meeting networks.

Our SNA on our data did not yield any significant results regarding the possible difference between the team interactions in the two environments. We believe this is again due to the limited sample size. The results of the SNA is shown in Table 4.

Table 4. Descriptive network statistics for face-to-face and virtual meeting teams.
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5 Conclusions

Teamwork has been long recognized as a fundamentally important factors in the organizations. As the fast advancement of information and communication technology, the organization structure and thus the operation frameworks for teamwork also evolve quickly. We recognize the emerging significance trends of the “virtual team” in today’s increasingly interconnected digital global society. While abundant research had been done to study teamwork within the context of traditional teamwork in close physical proximity environment, the studies in the teamwork dynamics in virtual environment is severely lacking.

In this study, we contribute to the study of teamwork dynamics in virtual environment by investigating the impacts of physical meeting vs. virtual meeting on the relationship between two critical factors in teamwork dynamics: team psychological safety and team creativity. In addition, we also attempt to study the impacts of mode of meeting on team member interactions.

Our initial findings showed a correlation between face-to-face interactions and virtual interactions. Positive team creativity during face-to-face interactions was correlated with lower psychological safety in the virtual environment which can be explained by individual’s lack of experience in such environments. Team creativity went down as well in the virtual environment as opposed to face-to-face. These findings highlight the discrepancy individuals feel when moving and interacting between different environments. This provides opportunities for virtual meeting service providers to develop technologies individuals can experience and become accustomed to.

We also found that when participants reported high on any factor (team creativity or psychological safety) there was a positive correlation in the virtual environment with respective factors. This provides direction for future research to investigate methods that support team creativity and psychological safety in face-to-face interactions and then apply those methods to a virtual environment. By doing so, such methods will provide a virtual environment more conducive to team work.

The main limitation of this study is the sample size. The amount of participants gathered provided enough individuals to create small groups but not large ones. Many of the analyses we conducted on our data did not yield significant results, and thus limiting the insights from this study. There is a possibility that greater interactions can occur in these environments with a larger number of members in each group.

The authors plan on conducting further investigations into team member interactions in these environments. We are currently in the process of transcribing and coding the video data. We will then proceed to conducting data analysis compare and contrast the team dynamics and team leaderships in physical team versus in virtual team environment.