European School of Management, Paris

Current management practices increasingly favour collaboration between internationally distributed organisations, be they private or public. EC projects illustrate these phenomena with hundreds of European organisations working each year on R&D activities. These teams are usually working in a distance mode where human interactions and group dynamics are assumed to follow other rules and patterns that co-located teams. These teams seldom meet face-to-face and primarily rely on ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to conduct their activities and communicate.

Does communication through ICT still allows for informal communication despite the apparent formalism of the media used such as electronic mail, electronic forums, audio and video conferences and project management software ? Our hypothesis is that informal communications do exist within the context of virtual teams but use other means and processes than in co-located environments. Drawing on the experience of EC collaborative projects, illustrative examples of informal communication processes used by participants will be identified and described. This paper is an exploratory research attempting to formalise the impact of informal communication processes on group dynamics within the context of virtual teams.

A growing body of empirical research has begun to examine the influence of electronic media on communication. (Yates J.A., Orlikowski W.J.and Okamura K, 1999; Orlikowski W.J. and Yates J.A. 1994, Orlikowski W.J., 1996). One of the major conclusion is that e-mail communication encourages the flow of information in organisations outside formally authorised channels and hierarchies (William L., 1998). Although still a controversial issue amongst experts (Hollingshead et al. 1993, Sproull and Kiesler 1991), another research stream has been suggesting that e-mail allows for a certain level of “ rich ” communication, i.e.  allows to convey some emotional, social, and contextual content (Walther J.B., 1995 ; Zaremba A., 1996).

When applied to the particular context of virtual teams, research on communication has focused on the issue of trust in global virtual teams (Jarvenpaa S L, Leidner 1998 ; Handy C. 1995 ). These authors suggest that global virtual teams may experience a form of “ swift ” trust but such trust appears to be fragile and temporary. An interesting contribution of this research stream is that it has pointed out the role of time in the evolution of the different forms of communication. Walther suggested that “ there is an interaction of time and medium on formality such that (a) formality is different in initial CMC conversations, and (b) formality decreases and converges in face to face and CMC after many message exchanges in both conditions ”.

Although the role of informal communication has been widely acknowledged in the context of co-located environments (Krackhardt D. and Hanson J. 1993), the issue of informal communication in virtual environments has been poorly addressed (Dickson K., 1996). This might stem from the fact that as virtual environments mainly rely on electronic communication, an assumption is made that informal communication does not play an important role in virtual environments where people seldom or never meet.

Having participated in a number of EC collaborative projects, we experienced the importance of informal communication at several levels of projects’ life. It even appeared to play a critical role in such collaborative environments which require a high level of communication and coordination. This led us to address the question of identifying the locus of informal communication within virtual teams, its functions and its potential impact on group dynamics.

2. Research Approach and Methodology

Williams et al (in Walther 1995) have called for longitudinal research in Computer Mediated Communications (CMC), recommending that “ researches studying new media use theories, designs, and methods that take change over time into account in order to improve the meaningfulness of their results and to capture the social dynamics of the new media ” (p.65).

Therefore, our analysis draws on direct experiences in three EC projects of two-year duration. Besides our own involvement in the projects, we relied on several unstructured interviews with each of twelve EC projects coordinators and partners. Interviews were focused on the perceived evolution of the project and of the relative bargaining powers of participating organisations over time. Informal communication was intentionally not directly mentioned by the interviewers, in order not to bias the answers, but was one of the underlying themes of the interviews.

A usual EC collaborative project consists of five to twelve partners with an average duration comprised between eighteen and thirty months. These partners usually represent between four to seven countries. These EC projects funded are R&D projects based on creativity and innovation. Although there is a common goal to achieve, individual partners might also pursue their own objectives that might raise difficulties and conflicts between partners. For their communication needs, these projects are mainly dependent on electronic communication. In our sample, face to face meetings did occur but were limited to four to six meetings over two years.

All these characteristics - inter-organisational, many partners, international, temporary, R&D, distributed and virtual, projects - contribute to the complexity of these EC collaborative projects, which require a high level of coordination and communication (Baumhauer and Naulleau 1997).

Usually, the project is divided into modules called Work Packages (WP). Each partner is responsible for one or more WP, each WP being carried out by individuals belonging to different partnering organisations. This particular collaborative structure defines four different levels of teams : (1) the overall project team, (2) the project management team, (3) the partnering organisation team, (4) the Work Package team.

Based on literature and on our own experience, we have defined informal communication in virtual teams as communication that is not planned by the project management and not constrained by formal procedures such as mailing lists that follow the different levels of the project structure as defined above in figure 1.

3. Preliminary Findings

From our analysis, we found out that informal communication was heavily used in our sample of projects, especially through e-mail. However, all means of communication were used both as channels of formal and informal communication. When looking for the functions and the uses of this informal communication, we identified different kinds of uses according to the different actors involved in the project management : project coordinator, Partnering Organisation (PO) managers and work packages members (see figure 2).

The Project coordinator uses formal communication such as mailings-lists and a few annual scheduled meetings to deliver broad project information to the partnering organisation managers. But he also relies on informal communication, either to collect contextual information about the local perceptions, motivations and problems faced by the PO managers, or to achieve alignment that is critical to any collaborative project. At another level, we observed that PO managers are using informal communication either to motivate their own organisations’ members or to reinforce their own bargaining powers inside the project. In the inherent instability of collaborative EC projects, those PO managers that manage proactively informal communication might thus create critical advantages for their own organisations. Finally, we found out that project members were using informal communication to influence their assigned WP with a view to decrease work pressure or maintain a certain level of well-being.

In conclusion, informal communication does play a key role in EC collaborative projects. Future research might address the issue of the relationship between the level of informal communication within a collaborative project and the level of project performance.

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