The Impact of Group Size and Social Presence on Small-Group Communication: Does Computer-Mediated Communication Make a Difference?

Abstract

Project groups are becoming a mainstay in today's work environment. This trend, coupled with globalization, has virtualized many teams, and has made communication among group members vital to project success. This study evaluates the impact of varying group size and social presence on small-group communication. It compares key communication factors for three different treatments: face-to-face (FtF) without computer-mediated communication (CMC) support, FtF with CMC support, and virtual with CMC support. This study also evaluates these impacts on two different small group sizes (3 and 6). The results indicate that smaller groups establish and maintain higher levels of communication quality. In addition, the results indicate that FtF with CMC support groups had higher levels of communication quality than virtual with CMC support groups; however, we did not find a significant difference between traditional FtF groups and virtual groups with CMC support. Another major finding is that CMC minimized the impact of increased group size. It appears that the process losses a larger FtF group might ordinarily experience can be reduced through the use of CMC. These results should help project managers plan for and deal with the difficulty of communication between project group members in virtual environments.

Keywords: Computer-mediated communication (CMC), small-group communication, virtual teams, social presence, social presence theory (SPT), and heuristic evaluation (HE)