Magda Donia of the Telfer School and Thomas O’Neill of the University of Calgary investigate how virtual work teams can enhance their task performance by integrating peer feedback. Their project, “Peer Feedback in Virtual Teams,” received a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Previous studies showed that informal and non-verbal feedback enables teams to gel by providing the cooperation needed for team members to work together. It’s an ingredient notably absent in today’s virtual work teams, says Donia, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour. “In face-to-face contexts, teammates benefit from things like water cooler conversations and opportunities to read people’s expressions, but virtual contexts lack opportunities for feedback to emerge naturally.”

To test their hypothesis that a well-designed peer feedback system might enhance cooperative behaviours and improve task performance in virtual teams, or VTs, the researchers will gather student participants in an experimental study involving several hundred small teams. They will be assigned different level of ‘virtuality’ to communicate and complete their tasks. Mid-way through the exercises, individuals will be given opportunities to provide and receive team-relevant behavioural feedback using an online peer evaluation system. A control group will complete the exercises without the feedback intervention for comparison. The data will be collected in the Virtual Team Performance, Innovation, and Collaboration Laboratory at the University of Calgary.

Yet such experimental ad-hoc teams don’t present the same characteristics as “intact” work teams, such as pre-established norms, member status differences, defined roles and responsibilities, or a vested long-term interest in the team’s outcome, Donia points out. For this reason, in phases 2 and 3 of the study, the researchers aim to test the use of the peer feedback system on cooperation and performance in different types of “intact” work teams, including actual employment work teams.

VTs have become ubiquitous in the modern workplace, employing virtual communications like instant messaging, email, and teleconferencing in greater or lesser degrees, but their efficacy relative to traditional teams has been questioned. “Several studies show that VTs underperform face-to-face teams, and cooperation is a core issue: it does not develop spontaneously,” Donia explains. “So there is less information exchanged, less critical analysis of viewpoints, less effective conflict resolution, and less use of specialized team member knowledge.”

Can peer evaluation offset this cooperation “deficit”? It’s intriguing to consider that a well-developed peer feedback exercise might serve as a kind of incubator for some of the soft skills on a team that hasn’t yet ‘gelled,’ suggests Donia. “It’s this idea that as people reflect on how they are contributing to the group and how others are contributing, as they listen to perspectives on what works well and what works less well, they are better equipped to respond to tasks that they have to complete. It's a forum for more information."

Professors Samir Saadi, William Rentz and Shantanu Dutta of the Telfer School of Management participated in the 26^th annual Northern Finance Association Conference [This link is no longer available], held September 12-14 in Ottawa. Professor Rentz chaired the conference session on equity valuation. Profesor Dutta and colleagues, among them professor Saadi, presented a paper examining the “governance role” of negative media coverage in the M&A decision making process. Saadi was also part of a team that presented research in the area of corporate payout policy. 

Richard Shearmur of McGill University, David Doloreux of the Telfer School of Management and Anika Laperrière (MSc, Telfer School) have won the best paper award in the category of innovation and internationalization of SMEs at the 17th McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference held in Santiago, Chile. Their paper investigates the use of external business services by exporting manufacturing firms, and questions whether this use is connected to their innovation behaviour.  

This is an excellent example of the excellence in our MSc in Management program at the Telfer School and of the quality of supervision offered to our students.  The Research Chair in Canadian Francophonie at the Telfer School, Professor Doloreux is Anika’s doctoral co-supervisor; she is pursuing her PhD at Concordia University. Professor Shearmur is with the School of Urban Planning at McGill.

Research summary

The paper drew on an original survey of 804 manufacturing establishments in Quebec. The researchers analysed the association between different types of innovation (product, process, management, and marketing) and internationalization, and the extent to which the use of these services for internationalization is moderated by the firm’s level or type of innovation.

The study found that exporting establishments use a wider variety of knowledge-intensive business services, or KIBS, and are more innovative than non-exporters, the study found. Although both innovation and KIBS-use are associated with internationalization, only for innovation is the association unambiguous. After controlling for size, sector and age, there is no evidence that exporting manufacturers have more recourse to KIBS than non-exporters; they are, however, more innovative.

Photo: Professor David Doloreux of the Telfer School, Doctoral student Anika Laperrière and Professor Christian Felzensztein of the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, organizer of the McGill IE Conference.

Congratulations to students in the M.Sc. Health Systems Program at the Telfer School of Management on their recent research successes. “Our students learn a great deal about research methods and how these can be applied to tackle critical problems in the healthcare system,” said Professor Craig Kuziemsky, Director of the M.Sc. Health Systems Program. “As we welcome a new M.Sc. cohort this month, we’re proud to see that many of our recent students have published or presented their thesis research in distinguished academic forums.” The following are some recent examples:

• Javier Fiallos (MSc 2013) developed an evaluation tool to assess the performance of Emergency Physicians, according to criteria such as resource utilization, patient throughput and quality of care. Javier worked with a team made up of Dr. Ken Farion, Medical Director, Quality and Systems Improvement at CHEO and the Telfer School’s Wojtek Michalowski, Professor of health informatics, to present his research at the prestigious American Medical Informatics Association symposium in 2013.
• Seyed Izad Shenas (MSc 2013) used data mining techniques to identify high cost patients. The study focused on the use of two data mining techniques (neural networks and decision trees) to build predictive models to identify very high-cost patients among the general population. Working with the Telfer School’s Professor Bijan Raahemi and Professor Craig Kuziemsky and Mohammad Tossein Tekieh of the CHEO Research Institute, Seyed published the results of his research in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine.
• Kate McNaughton (MSc 2013) published a qualitative study examining how roles are constructed within interprofessional health care teams. In collaboration with Professor Samia Chreim, a specialist in business management and healthcare management, and Professor Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health Human Resources, Kate examined different types of role boundaries, the influences on role construction and the implications for professionals and patients, such as the impact on professional satisfaction and patient wait-times.

“These are all excellent examples of the kind of research successes we are seeing among students in the MSc program,” noted Professor Kuziemsky. “The students are contributing new knowledge in several influential areas of health systems research – benefitting from our unique access to healthcare settings and the opportunity to work with leading researchers.”