Shared Mental Models for Better Virtual Collaboration : Is there Potential for Adaptation?

Background and Relevance: Virtual and hybrid work redefine expectations for video meeting systems (VMS), which should enable seamless collaboration. Users of VMS face challenges such as reduced engagement, lack of trust, and inefficient coordination. Further, virtual teams in organizational settings are regularly confronted with social dilemmas, where personal goals conflict with collective objectives. In these situations an individual's Social Value Orientation (SVO) has shown to significantly influence decision-making and team behavior. Unlike face-to-face interactions, trust-building processes are less explicit in virtual environments. To address this, we propose two intervention elements to strengthen the teamwork-related Shared Mental Model (SMM) of virtual teams.

Proposal and Methods: We introduce a graphical recall of personality by examining the relationship between the SVO Slider Measure and low-order constructs of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) with 42 students. Additionally, we propose the Mental Contrasting for Collaboration Rules (MCCR) method, which applies a Socratic approach to foster a collaborative mindset via mental contrasting, tested in a preliminary think-aloud study with six researchers. ... mehr

Results and Discussion: Our findings identify six PVQ constructs (achievement, power-resources, face, universalism-concern, universalism-tolerance, and conformity-rules) that are suitable for enhancing transparency about trustworthiness, but also raise discussions about Schwartz's conceptual distinction into personal-focus and social-focus. Moreover, while MCCR was perceived as useful, further iterations are needed to improve comprehensibility.

Future Work: We will refine the intervention elements and conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to assess their impact in social dilemmas (e.g., Weakest Link Game) and their effectiveness in improving team coordination across different team compositions.