When a face-to-face work group tries to accomplish its collective goals, the effectiveness and maturity of a group hinge on the combination of the functional roles performed by group members¡X task-oriented roles and group maintenance roles [Klopf, 1981; Benne et. al., 1948]. This research examines the phenomenon of group developmental processes, the functional roles performed by group members, and the relationships among certain critical functional roles, group maturity, and team effectiveness in the learning-task oriented virtual team setting. The samples are 24 project teams composed by part-time graduate students in a cyber university. After analyzing the group discussion sections by content analysis method, the development processes of these virtual teams demonstrate Tuckman¡¦s five-stage model of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. For the groups on forming stage, there are only two group maintenance roles ¡X initiator and information seeker/giver, performing by virtual team members. Conflicts between team members are not obvious due to virtual teams¡¦ learning-oriented task. Three group maintenance roles ¡X encourager, gatekeeper, and follower will encourage the occurrence of group cohesiveness and lead virtual teams to norming stage. Furthermore, when groups mature, four emerging task-oriented roles ¡X opinion seeker/giver, coordinator, orienter and evaluator will enhance the virtual team effectiveness. Negative functional roles (process-hindering roles) are rare due to virtual team¡¦s learning-oriented task. Therefore, this result indicates that members in a virtual team should play different critical positive functional roles according to their group¡¦s developmental stages, and it will facilitate group evolvement and improve team effectiveness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0728100-133615 |
| Date | 28 July 2000 |
| Creators | Leu, Wan-Yu |
| Contributors | T. P. Liang, Tungching Lin, Fu-Ren Lin |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0728100-133615 |
| Rights | off_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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