IMPACT OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ON VIRTUAL TEAM PROCESS AND PROJECT PERFORMANCE IN OFFSHORED ENGINEERING PROJECTS

Communication Technologies have redefined the notion of virtual-ness allowing organizations to collaborate more effectively in virtual space to deliver complex and reciprocally interdependent engineering projects. Though a number of studies have explored the role of information and collaborative technology on virtual teamwork, little research has been conducted so far in off-shored engineering projects featuring virtual teams to understand how different types of communication technologies impact the various stages of the team process which subsequently affect team knowledge gain and successful project performance. A research experiment was conducted wherein postgraduate engineering students from IIT Madras, India and University of Twente, The Netherlands collaborated virtually to develop CAD models and cost estimates of ongoing construction projects in two different countries. In this paper, we examine the performance of six teams that executed this academic exercise virtually over a period of three months using three different communication tools with varying degree of virtual-ness, namely, Skype, Videoconference and Second Life. The exploratory study consisted of three sets of two teams each having similar medium of communication but with different project locations