Comparing Virtual and Face-to-Face Team Collaboration: Insights From an Agent-Based Simulation

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the acceptance of virtual team collaboration as a replacement for face-to-face collaboration. Unlike face-to-face collaboration, virtual collaboration has different factors like technology mediation influencing communication that affects a team’s processes. However, there is a lack of rigorous research that assesses the impact of virtual teaming on the engineering design process. Therefore, the current study investigates the effect of virtual team collaboration on design outcomes by means of the MILANO (Model of Influence, Learning, and Norms in Organizations) framework. To tailor MILANO for virtual collaboration, this paper first presents an empirical study of human design teams, that shows how the model parameters for face-to-face collaboration (like self-efficacy, perceived influencers, perceived degree of influence, trust and familiarity) must be modified. The empirical study also shows the positive impact of effective communication on conflict resolution, task cohesion and the model parameters listed above. The MILANO was used to simulate 4 common collaboration cases (such as teams with an experienced agent, half of the team with high self-efficacy, all agents with the same self-efficacy and all agents with the same self-efficacy working on a complex design task) in both virtual and face-to-face settings. The results show how design outcomes differ with collaboration mode. For example, teams with an experienced agent perform better when collaborating face-to-face. On the contrary, the teams where half of the agents have high self-efficacy perform better when collaborating virtually. Collaboration mode does not produce any significant difference in design outcomes in teams where agents have similar and high self-efficacy when they begin working on a design task. In general, virtual team collaboration results in a lesser variety in the solutions but results in a more uniform contribution by its team agents. Overall, the study shows the effect of the individual, team and task attributes in different collaboration mode (i.e., virtual and face-toface collaboration) on the design outcomes.