Cross-Cultural I/O Psychology : Human Interaction in Virtual Teams
It will be recalled from Chapter 4 on predictors that the interview is universally the most popular means of assessing an applicant’s suitability for employment. No other method comes close in acceptability and frequency of use. Even though the interview is not the most accurate means of making selection decisions, there is still great appeal in seeing someone face to face in the conduct of human interactions. The basis for this appeal is not fully understood, but it isdeeply entrenched and has become an issue in virtual teams. Virtual team members interact through a variety of electronic-based communication media—e-mail, audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and so on. However, such methods are questionable substitutes for face-to-face meetings among team members. Earley and Gibson (2002) presented the following commentary by a virtual team member from Venezuela expressing his reaction to electronic communication with his team : “Now for that particular piece I really think we’re going to need to come together as a group, you know face to face and has some kind of a workshop and work on that. Because there are just some pieces that need that continuity, if you know even if it is in a room eight hours or twoor three days, you need to have that interaction, you need to get those juices flowing and not stop after a conference call. Just when you are like sort of warming up, you know the clock is ticking. Some point in time you just need that face to face” (p.248).
Earley and Gibson stated that the most important and difficult issue in implementing a virtual team is managing the distances without losing the “humanity” and “personality” of the team itself “There remains something quite primal and fundamental about humans when they encounter one another directly rather than through the mediated realm of e-mail, video-conferences, and other electronic means” (p.248). Earley and Gibson believe that electronic communication can substitute for face-to-face encounters after the team members have first met, but they doubt that electronic communication is an adequate substitution for direct encounters. As with the employment interview, we are left the paradoxical finding that people place great faith in meeting each other in person, yet doing so does not necessarily result in high-quality outcomes.