Dr. Rolf Wigand Awarded NSF Grant

Dr. Rolf Wigand, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Chair and senior faculty member in Information Quality at UALR, with his colleague, Dr. M. Audrey Korsgaard of the University of South Carolina, received $400,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate the role of communication, trust, and leadership in virtual organization and teams engaged in collaborative research. Collaboration and cooperation are essential to innovation and knowledge creation, and virtual teams are a valuable tool for such collaborations. Characteristic features of virtual teams, such as the dispersion and diversity of team members and the reliance on information and communication technology rather than direct interaction, are advantageous but also pose challenges to the social dynamics of the team. The purpose of this project is to examine what enables teams to best meet these challenges. This project is a multidisciplinary collaboration among scholars from the University of South Carolina, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. It involves using the setting of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), i.e. Travian Games.