| This empirical study investigates the use of McClelland's social motives of power, achievement, and affiliation to form teams that work in a semi-virtual environment. The study seeks to determine if such teams exhibit trust and perform successfully while working in an online environment. Although many studies of social motives in face-to-face working situations exist, most are anecdotal. None has explored social motives in semi-virtual teams. The results of this exploratory study are of interest because to date there is no study that employs social motives to structure teams of students that work online. Sixty undergraduate students in two different courses, chemistry and English, used a web-based learning tool to collaborate on a team project in an online environment. Each team had three members. The Personal Values Questionnaire measures social motive strength and was used to guide the construction of the teams. Each team had one power strength individual and two other members both with strength in either the affiliation or the achievement motive. Measurements for trust, performance, and social motive satisfaction were taken at the completion of the project. The English and chemistry courses provided two separate sets of teams to study. Separate analysis of the two data sets determined whether social motive strength, social motive satisfaction and team construction by social motive strength showed significant correlation with trust and performance. The analysis showed that the formation of these semi-virtual teams by social motives influenced trust and team performance for the chemistry data set, but further research is needed to verify and expand these results. No significant results were found for the English data set. |
