Distance Matters: How Employee Geographical Dispersion Affects the Dissemination of Time-Sensitive Data in Virtual Teams
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International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) |  |
| © 2019 by IJCTT Journal | ||
| Volume-67 Issue-6 |
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| Year of Publication : 2019 | ||
| Authors : Dr. Jerry Wood | ||
| DOI : 10.14445/22312803/IJCTT-V67I6P105 |
MLA Style:Dr. Jerry Wood"Distance Matters: How Employee Geographical Dispersion Affects the Dissemination of Time-Sensitive Data in Virtual Teams" International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology 67.6 (2019): 37-40.
APA Style Dr. Jerry Wood. Distance Matters: How Employee Geographical Dispersion Affects the Dissemination of Time-Sensitive Data in Virtual TeamsInternational Journal of Computer Trends and Technology, 67(6),37-40.
Abstract
In our ever-increasingly connected world, companies are, more than ever before, hiring employees to work remotely. Workers are now free to live anywhere around the world. With online communication technology, an employee’s location is irrelevant. In fact, when employees need to collaborate with co-workers, they tend to do so through computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies, such as email. As part of their job, it is often the case that employees need to share time-sensitive data with co-workers before it decays and becomes useless. Typically, CMC technologies allow for the dissemination of data to others before it decays. However, when considering the geographic dispersion of employees, it may not be as simple. Employees may be scattered around the planet. Therefore, the sender of time-sensitive data may not be able to effectively communicate with a recipient(s) before that data decays. With this issue in mind, our research explores how geographic dispersion of employees collaborating in virtual teams effectively disseminates time-sensitive data using CMC technologies. We pursue this research topic by investigating virtual teams that have geographic proximity versus teams that are geographically dispersed by using surveys to players in a popular online game called Travian. Travian has over ten-million players globally collaborating in virtual teams to win the game. Surveys were administered over a 30-day period through the game’s forums. Surprisingly, the results of this study showed employees that have geographic proximity have more difficulty in successfully sharing time-sensitive data as compared to those teams that are geographically dispersed.
Reference
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Keywords
Information Quality, Virtual Teams