Presence and Team Performance in Synchronous Collaborative Virtual Environments

Abstract

Synchronous collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow distributed teams to interact and work. CVEs afford a sense of presence, or “being there” in the workspace, as well as the opportunity to “do there” via interactions within the environment. However, there has been limited empirical evidence to support the link of presence and team performance, especially for CVE work. We identified multiple dimensions of presence that reflect relationships known to be essential to collaborative work and conducted a CVE experiment with 80 teams. Our results suggest certain aspects of presence are more important than others in driving virtual team performance.