Conversation, awareness and coordination : a framework to enhance the development of social relationships for online teams

The development of social relationships and supportive team interaction underpins success in virtual teamwork. Students in technical fields such as information technology and information systems tend to require support in these areas. The case study presented in this paper demonstrates a framework to enhance social interaction within online teams. In a series of individual reflective logs, undergraduate students enrolled as online students in Human Computer Interaction were required to document their understandings and possible applications of three social mechanisms of communication and collaboration, in particular the concepts of conversation, awareness and coordination, in a series of teamwork tasks. At the end of the study, students documented a report on their virtual working and listed key characteristics for working successfully as an online team. Following a qualitative analysis of these reports from 23 students, it was apparent that the three social mechanisms were utilised for successful working. Further, the original technical definitions of conversation, awareness and coordination were extended to virtual team requirements, and were closely aligned to the success factors evident in the virtual team literature. On examination of the reflective logs of successful team members, the use of three social mechanisms guided their team interactivity and relationship building. Hence it is suggested that framing student interaction in terms of these social mechanisms has the potential to support technically focused students build positive online working relationships