Post 2: CMC in Business

This week's readings were interesting considering that we just completed our virtual team project. This was the first time I had ever participated in a full on virtual team and it was interesting. There were some minor difficulties in terms of communicating asynchronously via a discussion board, simply due to the fact that not everyone can consistently check and post to make sure their up to date. Barnes (2003) states that "virtual project teams can be formed, reorganized, and dissolved rapidly when the project is completed or the needs of the market change" and I found that to exceptionally true because our team got together, got the work done, and that was it. We don't talk on Skype and I will soon delete the team members from my contact list. This is just because I know I will probably never communicate with any of these people again. We formed for an assignment and worked together to turn it in and receive our respectful grades.

Another issue that arose for me was the component of trust. For some reason in every group project I participate in I am always weary of the other group members and their care and abilities to complete the assignment well and not commit the crime of social loafing. I suppose this is due to the fact that I would rather work alone and whenever I work in a group something negative always happens and that skews my view on working in teams/groups. Other issues associated with virtual teams and CMC are low individual commitment, role overload, role ambiguity, and absenteeism (Barnes, 2003).

I found it relieving to incorporate another form of communication into our group project. We mainly communicated via discussion board at first but then we moved on to another form of asynchronous communication which was email. I found emailing to be a lot easier for myself because I constantly have my email account open and can respond to a team member's email at a moments notice, where as with the group DB it was difficult to consistently check it for new postings (especially because I wasn't use to it). It was also nice to use the instant messaging and call conferencing services provided by Skype for the team meetings. Communicating using synchronous distributed communication means helped when we needed to converse about several different items for the project. It was almost a face to face interaction, where we didn't have to wait for each other to post to the DB or email back.

Barnes, S. B. (2003). Computer-mediated communication: human-to-human communication across the internet. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.