This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The research objective of this award is to consider how people manage their attention in multi-cultural collaborations between geographically distributed individuals. ?Virtual organizations??aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries?allow large numbers of people to collaborate across geographic, temporal and cultural barriers to achieve important societal goals. Despite the advantages of virtual organizations, it can be difficult for people to work effectively together at a distance. Most virtual organizations include communication tools, such as instant messaging, email, and even real time video conferencing. But because virtual organization members lack awareness of who is around and whether or not they are busy, they can?t use these tools effectively to coordinate their work with colleagues.
This award considers the issue of managing attention in virtual organizations in which people must collaborate with a culturally heterogeneous set of remote partners. The work addresses three critical issues for the support of awareness information in these organizations: 1) How do people assess others? availability, and what cues to availability do they themselves wish to provide others? 2) How can these processes be supported in awareness tools, both for desktop use and for use in mobile environments? And 3) how can these processes be supported in a way that tools will be accepted by the diverse membership of global organizations? These questions are addressed through a combination of tool development, survey and interview research, and controlled laboratory studies.
This work builds on substantial research in the area of interpersonal awareness and fostering informal interaction in geographically distributed groups and on awareness and attention in distributed groups. The work provides four unique contributions: (a) integrating empirical behavioral research with technology design and implementation, such that technology and theory inform each other directly; (b) understanding and harnessing culturally appropriate attentional behaviors in distributed groups to enhance our understanding of human behavior; (c) building and evaluating novel technologies for interaction in geographically distributed groups; and (d) considering how awareness and attention tools can meet the needs of a culturally diverse workforce. The work will lead to new theories and tools that will improve collaboration in virtual organizations of all types.
