Nekrassova, Dina (2006)
Emotions in Global Virtual Teams, Extending Emotional Self to Collaborative Effort of Global Virtual Teams
International Communication Association, annual meeting.
Literature review in context of virtual teams. ? doctoral student. I didn’t agree with ordering but some re-ordering made sense.
Communicative characteristics of text based CMC
Lack of clarity (KRO doesn’t the same apply to f-f)
Decrease in media richness – consequences for use of paralanguage
Does this lead to?
- Misunderstanding
- Conflict
- lack of trust
Virtual teams ( learning groups)
Characterised by
1. Geographical dispersion
Can’t benefit from situated knowledge – p4 ‘ characterised by mutual engagement in activities, shared enterprise experience and repertoire of resources’
Necessarily asynchronous in both time as well as space
2. Electronic dependance
Reflection and deliberation
Normal rules of turn taking disrupted
Equalises access ( should)
3. Cultural norms
How do they compare with cultural norms in f-f?
Expressing and recognising emotion in CMC
Perspective: In order to express emotion there is a need to adapt to the medium by some form of content substitution eg, to clarify, to compensate
KRO still leaves the question of how it is perceived and received by others.
Drawing from the `Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2004) which is entirely dedicated to the issues of how ‘people adapt semiotics as they move from one set of symbol systems to another, from speech to text ( Walther, 2004, p386)
Communicating gender and signalling identity ( Herring and Martinson)
Engage in coherent turn taking (Baron)
Express irony ( Hancock)
Fostering immediacy (O’Sullivan, Hunt and Lippert) by remembering and using names, inviting future interactions, and practising common courtesies
Types of paralanguage in text based CMC content
P17 ‘Emotion language consists in much more than the names of emotions’ ( Kovecsess, 2000, p188)….. as follows
- Simulated non-verbal expression (emoticons)
- Figurative expression (eg metaphor) – origins rooted in bodily experience e.g. hot head, hot and bothered, boil with anger, puffed up, swelled with pride, shake with anger, tremble like a leaf’, blind with rage, tremble like a leaf
- Stylistic – formal/informal, specific jargon, slang, salutation ( KRO not sure whether this should be included here?) capitals for typographical energy, italicizing for conveying feelings)
Examples of emotion in CMC
Flaming as an example of extreme emotional expression in CMC
Defining features
- Hostility ( Lea et al, 1992, Walther, 1992)
- Lack of restraint (Kayany, J.M. (1998)
- Disregard of social norms (Postmes, Spears and Lea, 2000, O’ Sullivan & Flanagin, 2003)
Non participation, no response and response delay
Jarvenpaa & Leidner(1999) leads to lack of optimism, excitement and initiative
Emotions as lived experience
On the one hand they are ‘self feelings’ ( Denzin, 1984) and on the other hand a person cannot experience and emotion without the implicit or imagined presence of others’ p3
P22 ‘ In other words emotionality locates the individual in the world of social interactions and his or her ‘embodied experience’
Denzin, 1985, p227 ‘ embodied experience is situated, circular, temporal and dialectical, for it turns back upon itself, affirming, denying and elaborating what is an is not felt’
i.e. feelings and emotions are not well defined psychological states
Methodology (content analysis) critique
Questions this methodology ie interpretation of the researchers determines the message label.
Refers to O’Sullivan & Flanagin(2003)
p22 ‘authors rightly contend that observers may lack contextual knowledge of specific social relationships among interactants and therefore cannot adequately assess and understand neither the wide array of individual nor collective emotional experience. Instead such contextual understandings and emotional experiences are forced to fit rigid frames of coding schemes with the purpose of achieving significant inter-coder reliability’
Provides own view P23 “ feelings of compassion, rage, caring, responsibility, trust and/or interrelatedness are not reduced to simply counting the number of uninhibited remarks, typos, emoticons, included in the message but are investigated in the full range of their manifestation in relation to the unique characteristics of virtual working (KRO learning) arrangements, multilayered cultural contexts and IDs
