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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Communication dramatically influences a team's overall performance. With the ever-increasing amount of communication media available, team members easily can become overwhelmed and engage in inefficient, ineffective communication techniques. Our research provides insights about who is responsible for team communication, what information must be communicated, where it is best communicated, when it is most appropriately communicated and why this entire process must be considered.
Teams get their work done by communicating. Twenty years ago, team members communicated through meetings, phone calls and voicemails. Fifteen years ago, email was added to the list of communication tools. Ten years ago, more communication tools were added, including voice-over-IP (e.g., Skype), net-meetings (e.g., Webex), dashboards and wikis. Over the past five years, social networking (e.g., Linkedln) has increased, as well as the use of virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) and cloud computing (e.g., Dropbox). This expansion of technological options has made communicating easier and faster, but it also has increased the time required each day to communicate. In fact, some days so much time is spent communicating that team members have difficulty getting any real work done.
Communication may lead to other pitfalls, such as confusion, misdirection or a lack of coordination. Yet rarely do people spend time thinking about the mechanics of communicating. The human side of team communication is in desperate need of consideration to improve the effective and efficient use of the plethora of communication tools that are available. For more than ? o years, researchers have been working to bring this issue to the forefront of organizational decision makers and team members. Studies have been examining how team members communicate from many different angles. The objective has been to understand how communication manifests itself on effective teams. These efforts have led to some answers about the who, what, where, when and why of team communication.
Who?
Exactly who is responsible for ensuring appropriate team communication? The answer is simple: Everyone. Whether it is the team as a whole, the individual team members, or even sources of information external to the team, everyone involved is responsible for making cognizant decisions about how communication occurs within the team. If allowed to unfold in an ad hoc, unstructured manner, team communication may be inefficient and lead...