Exploring the Influences on Information Sharing in Virtual Communication

Even with a great deal of insightful research, we are still struggling to explain and overcome some of the information sharing and decision-making issues that reduce teams' effectiveness. This research explores how the information sharing choices of team members affect subsequent information sharing by individuals and how information sharing choices influence individual decision-making. In addition, I explore how different communication media (text vs. video) influence information sharing and decision-making. I created a variation of an admissions task experiment that required individuals to process and share significant amounts of information. Participants received information from hypothetical team members and made decisions based on the information. The conditions varied by whether participants shared information first or received information from others first, by the type of information participants received, and by the communication medium used. I completed a pilot study that involved 106 participants recruited from Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and report on the findings.