Date of Award
Spring 1-14-2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy Business Administration
Department
Coles College of Business
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Adriane Randolph
Second Advisor
Dr. Dominic Thomas
Third Advisor
Dr. Aaron French
Abstract
The 2020 COVID19 pandemic forced the world to shut down and many workers were required to implore digital technology and work remotely. Remote work became a significant form of conducting business, and the number of meetings daily increased in the beginning of the month of March 2020 from a little over half a billion meeting minutes to 2.7 billion meeting minutes by March 31, 2020. Information Systems (IS) researchers posit that the use of digital technology induced by the pandemic will be permanently normalized. However, there are challenges that come with employing a remote workforce. Managerial teams have expressed their concern about effective collaboration and participation. Social loafing, the tendency for team members to lower their participation, was one of their top concerns.
In this work, perceived marginalization was researched as an antecedent to social loafing in relation to several characteristics of virtual team members. We examined perceived marginalization and its effects on perceived social loafing and explored the influence of virtual team members’ sensitivity to marginalization on this relationship. It extended the IS literature by reviewing another characteristic of teams, their composition, and how it can affect their effectiveness when faced with marginalization in an online environment. Further it tested the generalizability of the Alnuaimi et al. (2010) study on moral disengagement by using the scale created in the study to research the effects of moral disengagement on social loafing.