Studies on learning at work-place context have highlighted the problems encountered especially by the members of distributed team (Derry, DuRussel & O’Donnell, 1998; Cramton, 2001). While working geographically distributed in the same expert groups or teams, as it is increasing trend in global companies, there is an emerging need to find ways to ease knowledge creation and sharing. This study builds on modern research on collaborative learning (e.g. Dillenbourg & Traum, 2006) which gives a strong theoretical understanding about the phenomena how a group of people understand each other.

The main theoretical principles in designing these social working and learning situations emphasize socially shared cognition and actions between the participants (Thompson, Messick & Levine, 1999; Hutchins, 1995). However, in innovative team collaboration, the task of constructing new knowledge is a complex one. Reaching shared understanding in these complex situations can be hampered by, for instance, the team members’ ‘zero-history’. When organizations set up a new project, the team members might not be familiar to each other (~zero history, Levine & Choi, 2004) but they are still expected to communicate effectively. Before the team members can build new knowledge together, they need to have a shared cognitive frame that includes awareness of the shared goals and awareness of shared working processes (Beers, Boshuizen, Kirschner, & Gijselaers, 2005). One of the most important questions for efficient distributed team collaboration is how effectively the team members are able to start to conceptualize their cognitive frame, which affects later to achievement of shared understanding considering the project task at hand.

It has been found that avatars, the human like figures with functionalities, can motivate the interaction in 3D environments and make the communication more efficient (Talamo & Ligorio, 2001). Multiplayer games in general can offer a rich medium for collaborators that engages players (Dickey, 2005, Prensky, 2001) and create a sense of immersion (Lim, Nonis & Hedberg, 2006; McLellan, 1996) making the players forget the real world. In recent studies (Little & Madigan, 1997; Goddard, Hoy & Woolfolk Hoy, 2004) a concept of collective efficacy has shown to be an important theoretical construct to explain core process of effective team work. Bandura (1995) argues that collective efficacy resides in the minds of group members and, social activity refers to a group of people acting in some coordinated way and with some shared beliefs. Little and Madigan (1997) found that perceived collective efficacy is a strong positive predictor of work group effectiveness as well. According to this finding, it can be expected that if distributed team members gain a perception that their collaborative problem-solving has been successful in the virtual game environment, it raises their efficacy belief. This contributes to the expectation that their collaborative problem-solving will be proficient in their future team working situations as well. Using game technologies and game applications as a catalyst for team work gives also new opportunities to take advantage of appealing and immersive virtual environments for other than entertainment purposes.

The aims of this study are:

How to enhance the efficiency of distributed virtual teams in terms of collaboration and interaction?

How to support the creation of shared and new knowledge in distributed virtual teams?

In this study the aim is to script such collaborative tasks in the game environments, which cannot be solved alone by any team member (Weinberger, Ertl, Fischer & Mandl, 2005). When the team is faced with problems that they have to solve together, they are forced to communicate, share knowledge and negotiate. The experimental GATE-study will be arranged in April 2007 with the students (N=36) of Executive Master of Business Administration (eMBA)-program, who work daily in different organizations. The students will participate in a course, in which they will work as small four person groups to solve their collaborative course tasks considering Leardership and management. The course will be carried out as a distance course, in which the students will work from their authentic workplaces as they were real distributed teams. Before the course, a pre-questionnaire will be collected to collect information from the students’ skills and opinions on games, collaboration and distributed work. Specific team-skills training without computers will be arranged before the actual game sessions. The target of the training is to shed light on the different aspects of collaboration, such as problem solving, planning, decision making, setting objectives, time management and agreeing roles and thus make the students actively think of the phenomenon of collaboration (Prichard, Stratford, & Bizo, 2006). The actual game playing will consist of three 1-2 hours sessions and videodata will be collected from inside the game world. Based on the videodata it will be possible to analyse the team members’ discussions with voice-over-IP (players have headphones and microphones) and the navigation of the players’ avatar figures. A reflective group interview (Leemkuil, de Jong, de Hoog, & Christoph, 2003) will be carried out after each game and individual post-questionnaires will be collected after the course in order to analyse the possible changes in students’ skills and opinions compared to the pre-questionnaire. After the game session, the students collaborative problem solving will be followed for two weeks, when they will work as distributed teams within an asynchronous www-based environment.

The analysis of the data will be carried with qualitative content analysis methods. Based on research work discussed above (Little & Madigan, 1997; Goddard & al., 2004; Beers & al., 2005; Prichard & al., 2006), a game, which is used in the beginning of new projects, could be a useful tool to make the team members learn to know each other and make them solve conflicts in situations that are scripted in the game. It can be expected that if distributed team members gain a perception that their collaborative problem-solving has been successful in the virtual Gate game environment, it raises their collective efficacy belief.