A bridge too far: examining the impact of facilitators on information transfer in global virtual project networks

Abstract

As the architecture, engineering and construction industry globalizes and the use of virtual environments to connect this workforce becomes more common, it becomes increasingly important to understand how to best support efficient systems of information transfer in technologically mediated workspaces. Previous research has demonstrated that global project networks face technological challenges that can interfere with collaboration, and it has been argued that facilitators are an effective means to help networks overcome these challenges. We conducted a study to determine how facilitators impact the transfer of information through a global project network in a modally robust virtual workspace by examining the centrality of facilitators and actors from different knowledge domains. We used task conflict duration as an outcome variable in comparing the performance of two facilitated and two non-facilitated networks of student teams engaged in complex design and planning projects. Our findings indicate that when facilitators occupied highly central positions during task interactions, conflict length was observed to increase. In non-facilitated networks, highly central actors emerged from a variety of knowledge domains and conflict length was observed to decrease. This evidence suggests that while facilitators are typically viewed as information bridges in global project networks, when they are central to task discussions, facilitators may impede the development of efficient network structures.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• computer-supported collaborative work
• conflict
• facilitation
• globalization
• project networks
• virtual teams

Acknowledgements

This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0943069 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Fellowship grant. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The authors also wish to thank the Centennial Foundation of the Finnish Technologies and Columbia University for additional project funding as well as our other CyberGRID collaborators; Professor Riitta Smeds at the Helsinki University of Technology, Ashwin Mahalingam at the Indian Institute of Technology—Madras and Timo Hartmann at the University of Twente. The project has benefited from the annotation, coding and analysis by Haena Lee at Columbia University, Semra Comu at Virginia Tech and Anne Anderson at the University of Washington.