Activity Awareness as a Means to Promote Connectedness, Willingness to Do Additional Work, and Congeniality: An Experimental Study

Haines Russell, Kramer Malte, Vehring Nadine

Abstract

People have been shown to exhibit social loafing when working as a team, and these effects are thought to be enhanced when working in distributed contexts. This paper reports on an experiment that examined the effect of activity awareness on feelings of connectedness and willingness to work in virtual teams. The results show that activity awareness indeed had a significant impact on feelings of connectedness and that the relationship between activity awareness and willingness to work was fully mediated by feelings of connectedness. Higher feelings of connectedness and willingness to work were associated with higher feelings of congeniality toward the team, which in turn were associated better team performance. Thus, we suggest that social loafing can be decreased in distributed contexts by reporting the activities of team members.