Title: Developing a measure of collective awareness in virtual teams

Authors: Mohamed Daassi, Marc Favier

Addresses: Cerag Laboratory, CNRS – UMR 5820, University of Grenoble, France. ' Cerag Laboratory, CNRS – UMR 5820, University of Grenoble, France

Abstract: Collective awareness has been advocated as critical to the successful introduction and use of groupware systems and therefore in supporting virtual collaboration. To date, however, no study has attempted to develop a scale for measuring the awareness levels in the context of virtual teams. In this paper, we report on the development of a measurement scale that captures the degree of collective awareness in virtual teams. The instrument measures two dimensions of awareness: activity awareness and social awareness. We follow a rigorous empirical scale development process to create a bidimensional measurement scale that exhibits satisfactory levels of reliability and validity. The classic indicators of validation confirm the inclusive nature of collective awareness based on the two dimensions suggested. The instrument should prove useful to virtual teams as it provides an aggregate measure of the degree of their awareness. This instrument equally facilitates an evaluation of interactive systems| user-friendliness, based on their ability to maintain user awareness.

Keywords: collective awareness; groupware systems; interactive processes; activity awareness; awareness taxonomy; measurement scales; measurement scale design; social awareness; virtual teams; user awareness; management information systems; MIS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2007.012543

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2007 Vol.2 No.4, pp.413 - 425

Published online: 22 Feb 2007 *

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