Effects of Distributed Teamwork and Time Pressure on Collaborative Planning Quality

Distributed teamwork is not without its difficulties. The detrimental aspects of geographical dispersion of team members on effective teamwork are often invoked to justify reluctance “to go virtual”, despite the fact that for some tasks, and under some conditions, distributed environments may be as good as, or perhaps even better than, meeting face-to-face. To test this assertion we compared radio communication and a more sophisticated communication environment to colocated face-to-face meetings on a collaborative planning task. The planning task required 36 dyads, working under low or high time-pressure conditions, to combine information and to produce a written plan. Our results confirm the detrimental effects of time pressure on the quality of collaborative planning and support the notion that distributed teams can produce work that is as good as work produced in face-to-face meetings.