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A long-standing question is how group perception, which is the perception of a whole group, becomes an exaggerated perception of the individuals who comprise the group. The question receives scant attention within computer-mediated communication (CMC), which is increasingly a communication mode for groups and a research tool to study groups. I address this gap by examining bias in group perception when rating copresence, which is the sense of being together, with the group.

I model bias as occurring when perceivers differentially weigh ratings of individual group members on a variable while rating the whole group on the same variable. I analyzed how the degree of bias in participants’ ratings of copresence with a status-differentiated group varied by the availability of visual cues during CMC in an experiment. I also examined how the group’s status hierarchy impacted bias.

Bias increase as the availability of visual cues decreased and ratings of middle status members were weighed more in group perception than ratings of other members.

Middle status was based on possessing inconsistent statuses. Inconsistency, and not status position, may have rendered these members more salient than others.

Interventions that target group perception may benefit from targeting the group’s middle status members. Researchers and practitioners can minimize bias in group perception through increasing the availability of visual cues in CMC.

The findings illustrate the underpinnings of copresence with an entire group. This is important because copresence shapes several group processes during CMC.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

We draw from psychological theories of leadership and literature on computer-mediated communication to challenge the received wisdom of the organization change literature about the need to match communication media richness to the equivocality of the task or change situation. We make the counter intuitive proposition that leaner forms of communication can be linked to higher perceptions of leadership charisma and effectiveness even in equivocal situations, and therefore can be more potent in effecting change than richer forms, under certain conditions. We discuss these conditions and the implications for organization change communications.

The changing technological landscape has brought about new forms of groups and grouping that span across computing and communication devices, space, time, institutions, cultures, realities (physical, virtual, and augmented), and intelligence (natural and artificial intelligence). This chapter utilizes a series of publication and keyword analyses to identify trends in group and technology research in the fields of communication, management, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) between 2008 and 2019. The results reveal prominent research areas, and recent shifts and emergent questions in the study of groups and technology, highlighting a complex entanglement of technology with collaborative social practices. The chapter concludes with a discussion of novel key areas and trends suggested by the analyses, with the goal of contributing toward a research agenda for future study of groups and technology.

Emailing does not preclude emotional exchange and many times it causes us to engage in spiralling exchanges of increasingly angry emailing. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to explore how factors of temporality are related to anger when emailing, to model circumstances that protect against, but also ignite, anger escalation, and to raise a discussion for practitioners of how to avoid damaging email communication. By intersecting literature on communication, information systems, psychology and organisational studies, factors leading to an ‘emotional verge’ are identified and summarised in a model showing factors likely to prime, but also protect against, anger escalation.

Many of today’s top organizations have implemented formal mentoring programs as a vital strategy to attract, develop, and retain talent. Human resource professionals have long recognized mentoring programs as an effective method to grow their organization’s intellectual capital and remain competitive. Both qualitative and quantitative research found that mentored employees experience job satisfaction, productivity and career advancement, which in turn creates profitability and cost savings for organizations. Historically, formal workplace mentoring programs were for a select number of employees. Due to time and geography constraints, face-to-face meetings between mentor and protégé were difficult to coordinate. While traditional mentoring programs provide benefit, logistics prohibit these relationships from taking full progression, giving rise to a new alternative: E-Mentoring. E-Mentoring lowers hurdles to participation using synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated means. Technological advances and forms of computer-mediated communication such as emails, chat groups, and video conferencing offer the potential for enhancing the E-Mentoring process. These new methods help to transcend functional, sectoral, and hierarchical barriers of formal mentoring relationships. Also, the non-face-to-face nature of the E-Mentoring relationship overcomes traditional barriers of age, race, gender, and status, which might negatively affect a traditional mentoring relationship. This chapter defines and compares traditional mentoring with E-Mentoring. It discusses the benefits and challenges of using technology or computer-mediated communication (CMC) for mentoring purposes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how organizations can implement E-Mentoring as a professional development tool in the age of technology.

Work teams have gained increasing importance as businesses shift to knowledge-based organizational structures. At the same time, advances in information technology have facilitated this change by enabling virtual work environments. To add to this complexity, the increasing demographic diversity of workers is coinciding with the rise in virtual and knowledge-based work environments. Therefore, it is critical that we understand the impact of these changes as they coincide in organizations today.

One of the extolled virtues of work teams is their potential to combine the unique knowledge held by individual workers, integrating these knowledge resources to bear on productive tasks. To effectively utilize their distributed knowledge, work teams have to perform three basic knowledge-processing activities: (a) knowledge acquisition; (b) knowledge integration; and (c) knowledge creation. However, work teams often have difficulty processing their distributed knowledge. The ability of team members, or lack thereof, to work effectively with each other is usually the problem.

The increasing demographic diversity of workers presents similar challenges for organizations. Demographically diverse workers have more unique knowledge, leading to increased knowledge differentiation in work teams. A work team that has high knowledge differentiation is one whose members possess different expertise. The unique knowledge held by individual team members effectively enlarges a work team's pool of knowledge resources. However, the increasing demographic diversity of workers often results in work teams having more difficulty processing their distributed knowledge because team members are not able to work effectively with different others. That being the case, the potential for demographically diverse work teams to more effectively perform productive tasks is lost.

We realize that demographically diverse work teams are a special (and important) case of teams in that they are both high on differentiated knowledge and high on the potential for conflict and other process losses. However, with an increasingly global marketplace, this special case is quickly becoming commonplace. Therefore, it is critical that we find ways to help demographically diverse work teams limit their process losses and realize their full potential.

Virtual work environments only heighten the need for demographically diverse work teams to minimize their process losses. Team members are often separated by both geographic space and time, which makes it even more challenging for them to work effectively with each other. In such environments, team members are often isolated from one another and find it difficult to feel a part of their team. Interestingly, computer-mediated communication has been shown to enhance team performance by helping team members communicate more effectively with each other. In fact, empirical work by Bhappu, Griffith, and Northcraft (1997) suggests that computer-mediated communication can actually help demographically diverse work teams process their distributed knowledge more effectively.

In this chapter, we will discuss the effects of demographic diversity and virtual work environments on knowledge processing in teams. More specifically, we will describe when computer-mediated communication is likely to enhance knowledge processing in demographically diverse work teams and when it is not. In doing so, we hope to provide both workers and managers with a set of guidelines on how to best navigate these organizational changes.