I just returned from the Academy of Management conference in Chicago where I presented a paper that Surinder and I wrote with Professor Rui Huang. Our paper was an extension of the research we have been doing on leadership in virtual worlds that I wrote about previously. This paper focused on how one’s online identity may affect virtual team member perceptions and how virtual teams work together. Specifically, we looked at how one’s online identity affects perceptions of anonymity within the team and how that sense of anonymity affects group cohesion and satisfaction. We find this topic to be interesting and timely as organizations begin to use more online media for collaboration and communication. Organizations have to decide how much and if they are going to set rules or guidelines for how employees present themselves, especially as options for expression expand to the creation of avatars in virtual worlds.

For this study, we had student groups, who did not know the other members in their team, perform a decision making task in either Second Life or instant messaging chat rooms. Intuitively one might guess that people in Second Life would be able to and inclined to create an avatar that closely represents how they are in the real world. In instant messaging, I can only create a user name to project to the other group members, but in Second Life I can manipulate physical attributes of my avatar in order to project myself. However, research has shown that in spaces such as massive multiplayer online games, users will create identities for themselves that are more like their ideal self, or how they imagine their more perfect selves (see this article, e.g.), than identities that reflect how they really are. So, we hypothesized that people in Second Life would actually perceive their online identity in the virtual world as less like their real identity than people in instant messaging. We also hypothesized that if users perceived their online identity to be similar to their real identity, then they would feel that they are able to project who they really are more easily to the group and others can recognize them more easily in the group.  In other words, those who had an online identity further from their real identity would perceive themselves as being more anonymous to the other members of their group. Additionally, we expected that when team members perceive themselves as more anonymous to other members in their group, it would be more difficult to build relationships with others and group work will be less satisfying.

Our results indicate that online identities of IM users were perceived to be closer to users’ real identities than online identities of SL users. The more the online identity was perceived as close to one’s real identity, the lower was perceived anonymity of oneself and others. We also found that higher levels of perceived anonymity led to lower levels of perceived cooperation, group cohesion, and satisfaction within the groups. In other words, how closely one’s online identity resembles one’s real identity can influence how team members experience virtual team processes and outcomes in decision-making tasks. The features available for creating one’s identity in a given medium can influence how one creates one’s online identity and how close that identity might resemble one’s real identity. The more choices that are available, the more likely a user is to create an identity that is less like their real self.

Although this is a first step in understanding the role of online identity in group processes in virtual teams, some initial recommendations can be drawn from the study results. These ideas are based on the assumption that the virtual team or collaborators do not know each other well and do not have opportunities to meet face-to-face.

• Organizations may want to consider making guidelines in virtual worlds for how much one’s avatar should differ from how one looks in the real world, especially for teams in which the members do not know each other well yet or are not able to meet face-to-face, but must collaborate to finish a task. This may also apply to meeting clients or customers in a virtual world when there is not an established relationship, although this still needs to be tested. If given too much latitude in the creation of online identities in the virtual world, the results could be a lack of group cohesion, trust and satisfaction.
• If business is being conducted in a public virtual world such as Second Life, organizations may want to have employees create one identity, close to their real identity, for their work-related interactions and a separate one for using the virtual world for entertainment.
• Organizations that are creating their own virtual world platform may want to carefully consider the features available for creating online identities. More features may lead to the creation of online identities further from users’ real identities which might negatively impact team outcomes. Or, if given many features for online identity creation, organizations may want to also provide guidelines to employees.
• Team leaders that are bringing virtual teams together may want to consider which medium to use for team meetings and tasks. For teams that are meeting for a short period of time, or that have to work together to solve a problem, fewer available features for manipulating online identity may enhance the ability of the team to feel cohesion in the group.

If you have used a virtual world for collaboration, we would love to hear your experiences and perceptions regarding the impact of identity on your team or work.