Distributed People and Distributed Information: Vigilant Decision-Making in Virtual Teams

The theoretical framework of vigilant interaction theory is used to examine information exchange and decision-making quality in virtual teams. Groups completed a hidden profile task in one of three geographic dispersion conditions: all members colocated, isolated, or mixed with two colocated and two isolated members. Vigilant interactiondiscussion of task information, attention to other group members' information, discussion of positive and negative attributes of the alternatives, and systematic information processingpredicted decision quality. Explicit reminders of information differences predicted pooling of unique information. No evidence was found for difficulties in interaction and task performance due to subgroup faultline dynamics; instead vigilant interaction was highest in groups with mixed distributions, suggesting they exerted compensatory effort. Exploratory analyses suggested that temporal vigilance was lowest in completely distributed groups. Implications for new dimensions of the vigilant interaction theory framework are discussed.