Impacts of Team Composition of Distance and On-Campus Students on the Conceptual Design Performance

In light of the rapid development of distance education, the distributed project teams that consist of both distance and on-campus students are becoming increasingly popular in many engineering design courses. This study examines different types of distributed design teams in terms of their collective ideation effectiveness. Depending on the distribution scale, various design teams can be classified into three types: collocated, partially distributed, and fully distributed teams. Furthermore, depending on the distribution distance, the distributed teams can be further categorized into “far” and “near” distributed teams. In this study, we evaluate and compare the ideation effectiveness of 24 team design in terms of the metrics of quantity, variety, quality and novelty. The results indicate that, compared to the fully distributed teams, both collocated and partially distributed teams demonstrate better ideation performance but in different metrics. The “far” distributed teams have a significantly better performance than the “near” distributed teams in terms of variety.

Emergence of Differing Electronic Communication Norms Within Partially Distributed Teams

Modern organizations often consist of teams in which some people are collocated and some are remote. These teams are in-between being entirely virtual to entirely face-to-face and are referred to as partially distributed teams. Partially distributed teams function and operate in two different media environments, varying in availability of communication channels. These media environments may encourage different communication patterns, widening a gap produced by distance. In two laboratory studies we demonstrate that different electronic communication norms (ECNs) emerge among members of the same team based on their media environments. Most of the norms regarding use of electronic communication persisted even when media environment was changed. This difference in ECNs might serve as an additional faultline, causing an additional rift within distributed teams.