Media Compensation Theory: A Darwinian Perspective on Adaptation to Electronic Communication and Collaboration

This chapter proceeds from the paradox that virtual work, teams, and collaboration are generally successful, sometimes even outperforming face-to-face collaborative work efforts in spite of much theory that predicts the opposite. We review theories that have previously been used to explain behavior toward electronic communication media, highlighting a theoretical gap, which is partially filled with a new Darwinian perspective called media compensation theory. Eight theoretical principles are discussed – media naturalness, innate schema similarity, learned schema variety, evolutionary task relevance, compensatory adaptation, media humanness, cue removal, and speech imperative. Those principles are then used as a basis for a discussion of the impact that different media have on virtual collaboration, work and teams. Empirical evidence in connection with the theoretical framework is described. In particular, empirical studies of idea generation, problem solving, and business process redesign tasks are reviewed. The evidence reviewed provides empirical support for the theoretical framework proposed, and a future research agenda on virtual teams from a media naturalness perspective is proposed, especially in terms of temporal processes, adaptation, trust and cheater detection.