Virtual Collaborative Groups: Two Case Studies of Group Development and Emergent Leadership

Computer-mediated collaboration is an important feature of modern organizational and educational settings but it is still compared unfavourably with traditional collaboration because non-verbal and paralinguistic cues are minimal. This book analyzes how virtual collaborative groups develop and how leaders emerge in asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated environments using cognitive and affective dimensions of communication activity. A multi-level methodology (Complementary Explorative Data Analysis) is developed to enable quantitative and qualitative analyses of communication data sets from two different case studies. The results indicate that virtual collaborative groups in organizations and education institutions are highly adaptive to the task to be completed, and the medium in which they collaborate. The analyses have practical implications for managers of virtual teams and educators in e-learning.