Effects of Task Significance, Coordination and Incentive Mechanisms
on Motivation of Online Teams
Juliana de Melo Bezerra, Lara Santos Diniz, Victor da Silva Montalvão and Celso Massaki Hirata
Computer Science Department, ITA, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil
Keywords: Motivation, Participation, Online Teams, Collaboration, Incentives.
Abstract: Online teams are useful due to both flexibility and facility to gather resources originally dispersed.
However, its intrinsic characteristic of separation in space and time imposes challenges to participation.
Belief in task significance has positive effects on moving members to participate, while incentive
mechanisms can be added to foster participation. Coordination is a central to a successful collaboration,
since it guides members’ participation. As participation is driven by motivation, we focus on motivation.
We conducted an experiment to analyze the effects on motivation of the following aspects: task
significance, quality of team coordination, and usage of incentive mechanisms. We discuss the relevance of
these aspects; the characteristics that make them contribute to or interfere on online motivation; as well as
the interplay among the aspects that can increase or reduce the aspects’ effect.
1 INTRODUCTION
The usage of information and telecommunication
technology through Internet allows individuals to
collaborate in online teams to accomplish tasks.
Individuals, dispersed in terms of geography,
organization, and/or time, are assembled together in
response to specific needs for an often short period
of time (Grabowski and Roberts, 1998; Powell et al.,
2004).
The benefits of online teams are mainly related
to the flexibility to gather valuable resources and
knowledge originally dispersed among people, by
reducing time and expenses for locating them
(Johnston and Rosin, 2011; Karayaz, 2004). Distinct
organizations may rely on online teams, for instance
global companies based on research, product
development, or service provision. Online teams are
also useful in educational context to prepare students
to online demands of global organizations (Kaiser et
al., 2000), and to promote international collaborative
learning (Clear and Kassabova, 2005).
Separation in space and time is an intrinsic
characteristic of online teams that imposes
challenges to participation. Online teams face both
structural and contextual issues, including lack of
social context, limitation of informal
communication, and difficulty in providing shared
context, visibility and knowledge transfer (Powell, et
al. 2004; Casey and Richardson, 2006). Such issues
can negatively affect trust, cohesion and relationship
building among members (Robey et al., 2000). In
this trend, research has been conducted to
understand the specificities of online teams in
contrast to traditional face-to-face teams.
An online task to be accomplished requires
participation of members. However, it is not easy to
obtain participation, since it is mainly driven by
motivation (Herzberg, 1959). Our focus is then on
motivation of online teams. Motivation was found to
be positively affected by how members believe in
the significance of the task being developed (Staples
and Cameron, 2004). Coordination is seen as a
serious issue that, if not well conducted, can damage
team success (Casey and Richardson, 2006; Beise et
al., 2010). The use of online incentive mechanisms
is often advocated as a way to influence motivation
aiming to improve individual behavior (Tedjamulia,
2005; Kraut and Resnick, 2008).
In this paper, we conduct an exploratory
experiment to investigate effects on motivation of
three aspects: task significance, coordination, and
incentive mechanisms. We investigate
characteristics that make the aspects contribute or
not to members’ motivation and in turn to team
success. Team success is analyzed through the
obtained participation, by assessing team
effectiveness with respect to team performance and
303
de Melo Bezerra J., Santos Diniz L., da Silva Montalvão V. and Massaki Hirata C..
Effects of Task Significance, Coordination and Incentive Mechanisms on Motivation of Online Teams.
DOI: 10.5220/0005404803030310
In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2015), pages 303-310
ISBN: 978-989-758-106-9
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
team satisfaction. We also reason about the interplay
among the three aspects, in a way to identify
possible interferences that make one aspect
ineffective in the presence of another.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next
section, we discuss the background of the work.
Later, in Section 3, we explain how we design the
experiment. In Section 4, we present the experiment
results and analyze them. In Section 5, we discuss
the results of the experiment. Conclusions and future
work are presented in the last section.
2 BACKGROUND
Special characteristics make a task suitable to online
teams. For instance, decomposability is an attribute
that makes possible to structure the task into sub-
tasks and engender dependences between members
(Piccoli, et al., 2004). Autonomy is also important,
insofar as team should be self-sufficient to solve the
problem regardless of external resources. Moreover,
a task should be complex enough to require
interaction of members, but always considering
members’ skills (Staples and Cameron, 2004, Casey
and Richardson, 2006). These characteristics are
important when defining a task to be performed by a
team. A particular characteristic, which is task
significance, is critical. A task should be significant
to members, in a way that they believe in its
importance and purpose (Staples and Cameron,
2004).
Teamwork presupposes collaboration, which is
realized through communication and coordination
(Ellis et al., 1991). Communication is required to
make members exchange information, negotiate and
take decisions. The virtual nature of communication
makes online teams prone to problems, such as false
interpretation of behavior in case of non-response of
messages or incorrect use of text emphasis
(Crampton, 2001; Bezerra and Hirata, 2012).
Although communication issues can damage team
motivation, they are more limiting to larger groups
or virtual communities. Coordination refers to the
management of activities being carried out by
members (Fuks et al., 2007). Coordination is defined
by the integration and harmonious adjustment of
individual work efforts towards the accomplishment
of a larger goal (Ellis et al., 1991). Some studies
indicate directives to enhance online coordination,
for instance to specify intermediate deadlines and to
promote training of members with the online
environment previously (Kaiser et al., 2000). Other
studies have investigated organization types used by
online teams, including fixed organization (Piccoli,
et al., 2004), self-organization (Bezerra, et al.,
2012), and shared leadership (Robert, 2013).
Coordination can be impeditive to team success,
since it includes activities to organize members’
actions and interactions to accommodate task
execution respecting its schedule (Casey and
Richardson, 2006; Beise et al., 2010).
In order to improve members’ participation in
online environments, incentive mechanisms can be
used as a strategy to influence individuals by
addressing their motivations. Research about
motivation and incentives has been conducted in
distinct types of online teams and communities, for
instance e-learning (Jacob and Sam, 2010; Gutierrez
et al., 2011) open-source software development
(Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006; Fang and Neufeld,
2009), and knowledge sharing (Chang and Chuang,
2011; Bross, et al, 2007). Popular incentive
mechanisms are those related to performance
appraisal (eg. to inform the value of one’s
participation) and social recognition (eg. peer
recognition, compliments, and praise) (Tedjamulia et
al., 2005; Janzik and Herstatt, 2008). Particular
settings of online teams, such as those that belong to
a company, can have intrinsic compensations (as
monetary compensations or careers plans) that help
moving members to participate. Teams based on
volunteering face augmented challenges to promote
participation (Tedjamulia et al., 2005; Kuznetsov,
2006; Bezerra and Hirata, 2011).
Related work investigates in a separated way the
aspects of interest, including task significance,
coordination and incentive mechanisms. Our
objective is both to understand the relevance of these
aspects to online motivation and to reason about the
possible interference among such aspects.
3 EXPERIMENT DESIGN
In this section, we explain how the experiment was
conducted using a qualitative approach. We present
the participants’ characteristics, the type of online
task to be developed as well as the provided online
platform. Besides, we detail the data collection and
measures, which were gathered through
questionnaires.
3.1 Participants and Online Platform
We invited 32 students of an Engineering college to
participate in our research. Their ages range from 18
to 25. They were divided randomly in four teams of
WEBIST2015-11thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies
304
eight people. Here we call the teams as A, B, C and
D. Each team should work online in a distinct
environment keeping team independence. The online
task was to specify a project to be developed by
future students of the Programming course. The
project should be edited collaboratively, and all
discussions should be held online. Anonymity was
maintained inside each team in order to eliminate
possibility of offline interactions.
The online environments were designed using
MediaWiki as platform. A project should then be
defined as a wiki page. For discussions, members
should use the respective talk page. We installed
LiquidThreads extension to empower the talk page
with resources commonly found in forums, such as
reply button, and automatic relation between
question and answers. Teams A and B used this
system. Teams C and D used this system with
incentive mechanisms included.
In order to select incentive mechanisms, we used
the foundation about online needs proposed by Kim
(2000), who brought the Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs to the online context and explains each need
as follows. Physiological need is related to system
access, and the ability to participate online. Safety
need, discussed together with the concept of
security, refers basically to protection from hacking.
Belonging is the need to be part of a group and to be
accepted by it. Esteem refers to the need to be
recognized by others due to participation. Self-
actualization is the need to maximize own potential,
by developing skills and opening up new
opportunities.
In our context, physiological and safety needs are
already satisfied with the designed system.
Belonging needs are addressed since groups are
defined and closed. We focused on esteem and self-
actualization needs. We proposed three incentive
mechanisms: ‘article feedback’, ‘contribution
scores’, and ‘contribution appreciation’. With these
mechanisms, we aim to stimulate members’
participation by allowing them, respectively, to
receive feedback about their proposal, to be
recognized by their contributions in the article, and
to have their comments appreciated in discussions.
Incentive mechanisms similar to these are
commonly found in successful virtual communities,
such as StackOverflow and Wikipedia (Bezerra and
Hirata, 2012). They act mainly with motivations as
prestige, visibility, reputation, recognition,
competence, challenge seeking, and progress
evaluation.
The ‘article feedback’ is a mechanism available
as a MediaWiki extension. It allows readers to
evaluate wiki articles using one to five stars. We
invite other 10 students, different from team
members, to act as readers and provide project
feedback. The ‘contribution scores’ mechanism is
also a MediaWiki extension. It shows, at article
footer, the names of members who contribute to
article edition. We developed the ‘contribution
appreciation’ mechanism. It introduces ‘like’ buttons
in the questions and answers in a talk page with
LiquidThreads extension.
3.2 Data Collection and Measures
The teams worked online during four weeks. At the
end, each participant responded a questionnaire to
evaluate his/her experience. Participants could also
provide comments to explain their responses or to
add new perspectives.
Regarding the online task, we investigated the
contribution of the task significance to members’
motivation, as well as what made the task attractive.
The respondents should evaluate the affirmative:
“Task significance contributes to my motivation”.
The respondents should also evaluate if the
following aspects contributed to the task
attractiveness: “the collaborative nature of the task”,
“the elaboration of a programming project”, and “the
possibility to use the project to future students”. For
the answer, we used the options: ‘strongly disagree’,
‘disagree’, ‘agree’, and ‘strongly agree’. The neutral
option was removed to force respondents to make a
decision, what is called the ‘forced choice’ method
(Allen and Seaman, 2007).
To reason about coordination, we asked about
the contribution of the coordination satisfaction to
members’ motivation. The respondents should
evaluate the affirmative “Satisfaction with
coordination contributes to my motivation”, using
the options: ‘strongly disagree’, ‘disagree’, ‘agree’,
and ‘strongly agree’. We also asked participants to
evaluate the following aspects: team commitment,
deadline meeting, and activities’ division. For these
questions, the options of answer were: ‘very poor’,
‘poor’, ‘normal’, ‘good’, and ‘very good’. Besides,
we collected the amount of comments presented in
forum in order to analyze participation in the
communication process as result of the coordination
activities.
Regarding incentive mechanisms, we designed
different questions for teams without incentives (A
and B) and teams with incentives (C and D). The
goal was to investigate, respectively, if the
possibility of inclusion of incentives could influence
motivation, and if the presence of incentives really
EffectsofTaskSignificance,CoordinationandIncentiveMechanismsonMotivationofOnlineTeams
305
stimulated motivation. For teams A and B, we made
the following questions about each mechanism:
“Could the incentive mechanism be useful?” and
“Could the incentive mechanism motivate you?”.
For teams C and D, we asked: “Was the incentive
mechanism useful?” and “Did the incentive
mechanism motivate you?”. The response options
were only ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We also gathered comments
about the systems that supported collaboration of the
teams.
We analyzed team effectiveness according both
team performance and team satisfaction. Team
performance is related to the delivery of a timely and
high-quality product or service as result of online
task. Team satisfaction is associated to the
satisfaction of members after team interaction
(Johnston and Rosin, 2011; Powell, 2004). In order
to evaluate team performance, we asked two
volunteers to act as evaluators by giving a grade
(zero to ten) to team projects. Evaluators were
students in the same college, but they were more
experienced than the participants that performed the
online task. They analyzed projects according to a
defined criteria, which include: originality (if the
project is different from the common programming
activities), learning potential (if the project is able to
improve programming learning in future students),
attractiveness (if future students could be motivated
to develop the project), and text quality (if the
project is well written and easy to be understood).
As team satisfaction is linked to the individual
satisfaction of taking part of the team, we invited
each participant to evaluate others’ performance in
the same team. We used the following options: 1
(very poor), 2 (poor), 3 (normal), 4 (good), and 5
(very good). The mean of grades assigned to a
member can then indicate the quality of participation
of that member.
4 RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
We present the results separated according the
studied aspects as follows: task significance,
coordination, incentive mechanisms, and team
effectiveness.
4.1 Task Significance
A high percentage of participants (89%) agreed or
strongly agreed with the sentence “Task significance
contributes to my motivation”, which shows the
relevance of the task definition. Among the aspects
that made the task attractive, 81.5% participants
agreed or strongly agreed that the collaborative
nature of the task contributed. To elaborate a
programming project was considered relevant to task
attractiveness for 85.2% of the participants. The
possible usage of the project to future students made
the task attractive for 88.9% of the participants. The
feedback of participants was similar in teams. We
did not observed relevant differences in teams about
task as a motivation factor.
We observed that participants were really
motivated with the task itself and its characteristics.
It is important to understand that these
characteristics were relevant for those participants in
that context. Participants were students in a
Programming course, so their activities were in
general the development of programs. To specify a
project was then considered more appealing.
Students of the chosen college live together in
dorms, and they know each other. They found funny
to design something to future colleagues to work on.
It would be a mix of reception and retaliation to new
students. Some participants reported that to
participate in a research made them attracted to the
task. Other participants commented that a positive
aspect was the offline repercussion of their
participation, since their roommates found the idea
interesting and so they felt prestige.
4.2 Coordination
Participants, in 74% of the cases, agreed or strongly
agreed with the sentence “Satisfaction with
coordination contributes to my motivation”. The
result shows that if people are satisfied with
coordination, they can be more motivated and
consequently perform better. Collaboration in teams
revealed coordination problems related to
commitment, deadlines’ meeting and activities’
division. Team commitment to perform the task was
considered ‘very poor’ by 3.7% of participants,
‘poor’ by 22%, ‘normal’ by 44%, ‘good’ by 22%,
and ‘very good’ by 8.3%. Participants considered
deadline meeting as ‘poor’ in 22.2% of the cases,
‘normal’ in 26%, ‘good’ in 26%, and ‘very good’ in
25.8%. The main problem was the division of
activities among members. Participants considered it
‘very poor’ in 26% of the cases, ‘poor’ in 52%,
‘normal’ in 15%, ‘good’ in 3.7%, and ‘very good’ in
3.3%.
Teams explained how they organized
themselves. The feedback was important to support
the findings about problems with task coordination.
Team A commented that initially they discussed
ideas of projects. After choosing a topic, one
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member elaborated a project and other members
only complemented it. Before the end of the task,
one member commented that the majority of the
team stopped contributing. One member also
assumed that he did not participate as desired.
Similar problems were found in team B, where
members discussed the initial ideas, but two
members were mainly in charge of the project
edition.
More aggravated problems were found in team
C. In this team, one member gave the idea and
practically elaborated the project alone. Other
member mentioned that communication was difficult
and suggested that to have few people in team could
improve collaboration. One member commented that
the online task demanded time to be accomplished
and he was not available as expected. In team D, two
members conducted the task by suggesting the
theme and making the team develop the text. One
member reported that he found grateful to
collaborate online by exchanging experiences and
observing others’ algorithms. Other member
commented that he contributed to the project by both
elaborating and improving the text. According to
one member, the team was very motivated and
engaged. Other member said that the team was a
little disorganized. Time and internet availability
were reported as factors that limited the participation
of one member.
We observed that problems related to
coordination were presented in all teams but with
distinct severity levels. Regarding communication,
the quantity of comments in the forum was the
following: 34 in team A, 42 in team B, 20 in team C,
and 86 in team D. We observed that team C, which
demonstrated more coordination problems,
communicated less. Team D, with better task
coordination, communicated more. It shows the
importance of communication in the collaboration
process, especially to achieve better coordination.
4.3 Incentive Mechanisms
We analyzed the feedback of participants regarding
the three developed incentive mechanisms: ‘article
feedback’, ‘contribution scores’, and ‘contribution
appreciation’. In Table 1, we present the quantity of
members that agree with the utility and motivation
potential of the incentive mechanisms. For instance,
regarding ‘contribution scores’, in team D, 8
members said that it was useful and 6 members
found it motivating. To better understand, we have
to keep in mind that each team was composed by 8
members.
Table 1: Utility and motivation of incentive mechanisms.
Incentive
Mechanism
Aspect
Quantity of
members
by team
A B C D
Article
feedback
Useful 6 4 3 6
Motivating 6 4 0 3
Contribution
scores
Useful 5 8 5 8
Motivating 5 4 0 6
Contribution
appreciation
Useful 5 4 3 7
Motivating 5 4 1 5
Teams A and B evaluated, in general, the
incentive mechanisms as useful and they had a
tendency to believe that mechanisms would be
motivating. It shows that the incentive mechanisms
were adequate to that context, and they really had a
potential to motivate members. Comparing teams C
and D, it is interesting to observe that both used the
incentive mechanisms but they had very different
experiences with them. Incentive mechanisms were
more valuable for team D. We believe the
coordination problems found in team C impacted,
since members were not involved and did not use the
mechanisms in fact. For instance, ‘contribution
appreciation’ mechanism is valuable if members
contribute and they are able to evaluate others’
contribution. According to the feedback of team D
about the incentive mechanisms, the ‘article
feedback’ mechanism was less motivating. We argue
that there were impediments that constrained the
usage of this mechanism and consequently affected
its motivating potential, for instance, the reduced
number of external readers and the short-time
characteristic of the task.
Participants reported their experience with the
systems that supported the online teams. One
member in team A said that wiki features were not
simple to use. Other member in team A added that
wiki page is not easy to deal with. As a member in
team D explained, the problem was mainly how to
format text in the page that is a little complicated.
We used wikis as MediaWiki platform provides.
Although it seems to work well in successful
communities like Wikipedia, it has limitations
related to usability as reported by some participants.
According to participants, a positive point of the
system was the forum. In this case, the usability
problem of talk pages in MediaWiki was overcome
by the use of LiquidThreads extension. The
extension makes transparent the need to add
EffectsofTaskSignificance,CoordinationandIncentiveMechanismsonMotivationofOnlineTeams
307
formatting to keep tracking between questions and
related comments.
4.4 Team Effectiveness
The evaluators assigned the following grades to
projects designed by online teams: 8.5 to team A,
9.8 to team B, 9.5 to team C, and 9.5 to team D. We
observed that teams reached good performance.
Problems related to coordination were not perceived
looking only the quality of the team outcome. For
instance, team C even with challenges reached a
great result. We argue that it happened because the
online task had an intrinsic characteristic of
creativity. Teams could overcome their internal
problems and elaborate a project with quality.
Table 2: Members’ assessment about satisfaction.
Member Team A Team B Team C Team D
M1 4.1 3 2.6 4.3
M2 3.7 2.3 4.8 2.8
M3 2.7 2.8 3.2 4
M4 4.3 2.4 3.4 3.6
M5 3.8 5 3.4 2.3
M6 3 2.4 3.2 3.4
M7 4.2 2.7 3 4.9
M8 2.1 4.6 3.8 2.9
To reason about team satisfaction, we compute
the mean of the performance evaluations of each
member. The evaluations were made by co-workers
with grades from 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good).
Results are shown in Table 2. The data can reveal
collaboration challenges found in teams. For
instance, in Section 4.2, we commented that two
members were mainly in charge of the task
execution in team B. We can see in Table 2 that
members M5 and M8 in team B were better
evaluated than others. Other interesting case
occurred in team D, where collaboration was
reported to be more productive. We noted that three
members (M1, M3 and M7) performed better, but
others (as M4 and M6) also have their importance.
The data regarding team satisfaction can also be
misleading in case of problems with members’
engagement. For example, in team C we identified
the member (M2) who participated more. The other
grades are uniform and near to 3 (average
performance). It may be interpreted as a uniform
participation. However, in fact, it indicates that
members who did not participate were not able to
assess others.
5 DISCUSSIONS
In order to motivate members of a virtual team to
perform an online task, the main directive is that the
task should be attractive to them. To propose an
adequate task is a challenge. We need first to
understand the characteristics of the members and
the context where they are settled. The analysis can
include both online and offline attributes, for
instance, participants in the experiment found the
task interesting due to the possibility to employ the
outcome to colleagues in future. Incentive
mechanisms can be used to stimulate participation.
To propose incentive mechanisms, it is required first
the identification of motives that drive members. In
the experiment, for example, we proposed incentives
related to prestige, recognition, and reputation.
There is no formal guidance to design incentive
mechanism. In this way, one future work is to
research directives to guide designers in the planning
of online incentive mechanisms. Directives should
include discussions about context, characteristics,
and motivations of members.
As we observed in the experiment, especially in
team C, the quality of coordination is extremely
important to online motivation. A poor coordination
can negatively impact members already motivated
by the task. It can also make incentive mechanisms
lose force, for example, a mechanism to appreciate
others’ contributions is not useful if members do not
contribute. We noted that the volume of online
communication can reveal collaboration issues. A
relevant problem regarding coordination was the
unfair division of activities in teams, mainly due to
lack of engagement. A relevant issue is then to
engage members in activities that they feel confident
to perform, in order to gather contributions to fulfill
the entire task. Further investigation is required to
design an online environment where members can
propose and identify activities for them or for their
co-workers. In this context, incentive mechanisms
can be used specifically to stimulate engagement.
In the experiment, participants reported
difficulties to edit wiki pages in MediaWiki.
Possible problems with the talk pages were
overcome by using a MediaWiki extension that
automatically formats discussions as we found in
typical forums. It shows the importance of usability
in online environments, since it can negatively
influence members’ motivation. We argue that
usability is an example of hygienic factor, as defined
by Herzberg et al. (1959). A hygienic factor refers to
a factor whose the presence is not stimulating, but
the absence can reduce motivation. Other
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308
consideration is that, sometimes, barriers can prevail
and limit members’ participation, for instance one
participant reported impediments due to the lack of
time, and other, due to internet problems.
Regarding team effectiveness, we observed that
team satisfaction is a good thermometer of online
participation. Team satisfaction can reveal
coordination problems related to engagement. In the
experiment, we measured team performance by
assessing the quality of the developed task. As this
measure only analyzes the outcome, it cannot
explain possible participation issues during the
process. As a limitation of our research, results and
discussions should not be generalized, since they
were drawn for a specific experiment. More
experiments should be made in order to improve
confidence on our initial results.
6 CONCLUSIONS
We used an experiment to investigate three aspects
that influence motivation in online teams, including
task significance, coordination, and incentive
mechanisms. We also analyzed the impact of
participation on team effectiveness, characterized by
team performance and team satisfaction.
Task significance is essential to motivate
members in online teams. It is the way to guarantee
the initial attractiveness of members to participate
online. Characteristics as task relevance and
usefulness are primordial. Offline aspects can also
affect positively task significance, for example the
repercussion of task results and the reputation
conquered for participating in an important task.
The quality of coordination is other aspect that
influences online motivation. If the activity
execution is well coordinated, the number of
productive interactions increases, resulting in more
motivated members. Disturbances in coordination
can occur due to unfair division of activities among
members, which ends up overloading some
members. Problems with unequal participation
among members can be revealed by team
satisfaction, but obfuscated by analyzing only team
performance.
Incentive mechanisms can be used to act on
motivation and consequently improve participation.
An effective identification of adequate tasks and
design of effective incentive mechanisms have to
consider members, their contexts, characteristics and
intrinsic motives. Esteem and self-actualization
needs constitute suitable categories of motivations to
be addressed by online incentive mechanisms.
Incentives mechanisms stimulate collaboration,
when members are initially engaged, but if in the
occurrence of problems, such as lack of
coordination, the mechanisms are ineffective. So,
incentive mechanisms work only if coordination and
communication are properly assured.
The findings are based on our experiment;
therefore, we intend to expand our analysis by
performing new experiments with more groups and
distinct tasks. As future work, we plan to design
features to promote online engagement in order to
improve activities’ division, by allowing members to
define activities and identify responsibility.
Incentive mechanisms will be used to support this
new environment. Further investigations include the
definition of a process with directives to help
designers to propose incentive mechanisms to
members in online teams and virtual communities.
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