This project aims to understand how actual and perceived diversity interact with communication media to influence virtual organization processes and outcomes. A key reason for leveraging technology to support virtual teams and organizations is to enable inclusion of the appropriate people ? a diverse set of people. Research suggests that diversity can lead to poor performance when it creates an environment whereby individuals are classified into ingroups and outgroups. In contrast, diversity can contribute positively to performance when a variety of perspectives are openly shared. Some research has theorized that elements of diversity will be invisible when interacting in computer mediated environments. Other research has found that individuals use any available piece of information to categorize others. Thus, while some diversity elements may become less impactful, new ones may emerge. Further exacerbating the problem is that perceptions of others and of media evolve over time, suggesting that what is learned at one point in time may not be accurate consistently throughout the lifetime of a virtual organization.
Through the use of survey, interview, and observational data, the proposed study seeks to understand the interactions among media characteristics, actual diversity, and diversity perceptions as they influence virtual organization processes and outcomes. By capturing this data over time, the proposed study will lay the foundation for future work examining virtual organization evolutionary processes. The proposed work is among the first to examine perceived diversity in conjunction with objective diversity, in a computer mediated setting. Additionally, the context for the study provides a unique opportunity to study virtual organizations as they are being formed. The results should contribute to theory in diversity and virtual organizations and should provide useful information for organizations, such as NSF, that wish to increase diversity and maximize outcomes in virtual settings.
