تجزیه و تحلیل شناختی در طول استفاده از ویکی در تیم های پروژه : مطالعه تجربی

Increasing research efforts attempt to understand how wikis can be used to improve team performance. Previous studies have mainly focused on the effect of the quantity of wiki use on wiki content quality in wiki-based communities. Our study focuses on the quality aspect of wiki use in a team context. We develop a construct, cognitive elaboration during wiki use, and explore its nomological network in the team context. Integrating literature on wiki and distributed cognition, we propose that cognitive elaboration during wiki use influences team performance (i.e., wiki content quality) through knowledge integration among team members. We likewise identify its team-based antecedents, including task involvement, critical norm, task reflexivity, time pressure, and process accountability by drawing on the motivated information processing literature. Furthermore, we empirically test the research model using multiple-source survey data collected from 46 wiki-based student project teams. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are subsequently discussed.

Contemporary teams use collaborative technologies to enhance group work and achieve superior team performance [2]. Wiki, an emerging Web 2.0 collaborative technology that enables members to engage in collective editing and knowledge co-creation [32], is deployed as a popular information technology (IT) tool in supporting a variety of collective content building [32]. Numerous enterprises, such as Adobe, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, have been increasingly using wikis to facilitate collective content building [11]. However, the deployment of wikis in teams does not guarantee that such teams can build satisfactory wiki content to serve team goals. Given the crucial role of wiki in supporting a variety of content building, exerting greater research efforts is important to understand how wikis can be used to collectively build high-quality content. Literature review indicates that our existing knowledge of wiki use and performance has been contextualized mainly in wiki-based communities (e.g., Wikipedia). For example, according to Wilkinson and Huberman [55], high-quality Wikipedia articles can be attributed to a larger number of edits. For Kittur and Kraut [28], the number of editors improves Wikipedia article quality. Although previous literature improves our knowledge of wiki, the main focus was on the quantity of wiki use to explain performance. Thus, a deeper understanding of the underlying factors of wiki-usage behavior that ultimately contributes to the effective content building using wiki is necessary. We propose that studying the quality aspect of wiki use provides a more in-depth explanation of the quality of wiki content building by a team. We believe that previous studies have neglected this important issue. The main objective of this study is to fill in the research gap by investigating the quality aspect of wiki use. We specifically address such aspect by developing a construct called cognitive elaboration during wiki use and examining its antecedents and team performance consequences (i.e., wiki content quality). In this paper, we identify wiki content quality as the major indicator of team performance in wiki-based project teams that use wiki for collective content building, as such endeavor is the de facto practice in these teams [32]. Wiki content quality refers to the quality of knowledge manifested in the form of wiki content that team members collectively contribute. Cognitive elaboration reflects the mental efforts that people spend in processing relevant information [10] and [37]. We propose that the level of cognitive elaboration expended in using wikis would influence wiki content quality in teams using wiki for collective content building. We specifically propose that cognitive elaboration during wiki use affects wiki content quality by enabling knowledge integration among team members. Furthermore, we explore its team-based antecedents by drawing on the motivated information processing literature from social psychology. In developing this construct and exploring its nomological network in the team context, our study contributes to literature by uncovering an important aspect of wiki use in the team setting. In the following sections, we review the relevant literature on wikis, after which we provide the theoretical background of the study. We then present the research model and develop the hypotheses. Thereafter, we describe the research methodology, analyze the data, and report the hypotheses testing results. Finally, we discuss our research findings and its contribution to research and practice.

Previous studies arming at explaining wiki content quality mostly focused on quantity aspect of wiki use in the context of wiki-based communities (e.g., Wikipedia), and failed to study the quality aspect of wiki use. In this paper, we develop a concept of cognitive elaboration during wiki use to study the quality aspect of wiki participation with regard to the content quality of team wiki. We argue that knowledge integration mediates the impact of cognitive elaboration during wiki use on wiki content quality. By adapting relevant situation-specific antecedents to the team context, we also study its antecedents based on motivated information processing theory. The results of this paper indicate that cognitive elaboration during wiki use positively influences wiki content quality through the mediating role of team knowledge integration. Furthermore, cognitive elaboration is positively associated with a team's task involvement, critical norm, and task reflexivity. However, process accountability and time pressure do not significantly impact cognitive elaboration during wiki use. Overall, the current findings contribute to our understanding of how wikis can be used to achieve superior collective content building by project teams. We achieved this by focusing on the quality aspect of wiki participation by advancing a theory of cognitive elaboration during wiki use. This study likewise contributes to practice by providing suggestions on how to improve wiki team performance.