Keywords

1 Introduction

Online teams are a strategy to global organizations keep competiveness. They are used in distinct kinds of organizations, including those based on research, product development, or service provision. Other contexts can take advantage of online teams, for example, the educational area, which uses online teams to prepare students to online demands of global organizations [23], and to promote international collaborative learning [10].

The main advantage of online teams is their virtual characteristic, driven by the usage of information and telecommunication technology through Internet. Individuals in online teams collaborate to accomplish tasks, by overcoming barriers related to difference in geography and time. Individuals can be assembled together in response to specific needs for an often short period of time [16, 30]. The reduction of time and expenses is an important benefit brought by online teams in contrast to traditional teams that require individuals to be collocated. Online teams then rely on flexibility to gather valuable resources and knowledge originally dispersed among people [22, 24].

The separation in space and time, faced by online teams, drives both structural and contextual issues that can in turn imposed challenges to participation. Examples of challenges include the lack of social context, the limitation of informal communication, and the difficulty in providing shared context, visibility and knowledge transfer [8, 30]. Such issues can even negatively affect trust, cohesion and relationship building among members [33].

An online task to be accomplished requires participation of members. However, it is not easy to obtain participation, since it is mainly driven by motivation [19]. Our focus is then on motivation of online teams. Motivation was found to be positively affected by how members believe in the significance of the task being developed [32]. Coordination during the task development is seen as a serious issue that, if not well conducted, can damage team success [3, 8]. The use of online incentive mechanisms is often advocated as a way to influence motivation aiming to foster members’ participation [26, 35].

In this paper, we conduct an exploratory experiment to investigate effects on motivation of three aspects: task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms. We investigate characteristics that make these aspects contribute or not to members’ motivation and in turn to team success. Team success is analyzed through the obtained participation, by assessing team effectiveness with respect to team performance and team satisfaction. We also reason about the interplay among the three aspects, in a way to identify possible interferences that make one aspect ineffective in the presence of another.

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss the background of our research regarding motivation in online teams. Later, we define our research questions. In Sect. 4, we explain how we designed the experiment. In Sects. 5, 6, 7 and 8, we present the experiment results and analyze them. In Sect. 9, we conclusions and future work are presented.

2 Motivation in Online Teams

Motivation can be defined as an impulse to act according to one’s desires. If people are motivated, they choose to realize something, because it has a meaning for them [37]. Hersey et al. [18] propose a model, shown in Fig. 1, which is useful to understand the origins of the behavior of a person in offline organizations. Although Hersey et al.’s model was initially proposed to individuals acting on offline group or community, it also suits online contexts.

Fig. 1.
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Motivation model [4, 18].

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According to the motivation model (Fig. 1), motives are something inside the individual that moves him/her to act. Objectives can be understood as expected achievements that satisfy the motives. The behavior includes the tasks performed by the individual in order to reach the objectives. So, behavior comprises participation. The motives (or motivation itself) of an individual can be influenced by both his/her experiences directly and the external stimuli indirectly. Experiences are acquired during life and include personality, education, and values. In this way, behavior aims to achieve objectives and can also contribute to the composition of experiences.

External stimuli, in Fig. 1, refer to facilities or limitations that the environment imposes to the objectives’ achievement. External stimuli may be ephemeral or eventual, i.e., they can be seen as opportunities or temporal restrictions that may not persist or may occur in the future. The main idea driven by the motivation model and used in our research is that the way to gather participation is through motivation, and motivation can be influenced by distinct aspects.

Fig. 2.
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Online team and motivation.

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Aiming to understand the structure of online teams, we study definitions of online communities. An important definition is the one proposed by Preece [31]. Preece [31] defines virtual community as a group of people, who come together for a purpose online, and who are governed by norms. Based on this definition, Melo Bezerra and Hirata [4] propose a model that represents a virtual community inside an external environment. The model also indicates the three main elements in a virtual community: members, system, and norms. Here we use such model to reason about online teams. We argue that the main elements of online teams are the same as in virtual communities. Important differences are regarding, for example, the quantity of members involved (in general, few members in online teams), and the period of time that members are assembled together (in general, online teams have short-term duration).

Figure 2 shows the integration between the online team model (adapted from [4]) and the motivation model (Fig. 1). Members are a group of people that belong to a team, and they should be aligned with the shared purpose of the team. Members in general respect the directives of the external environment in which they are immersed. In the other way, the external environment can affect the team members. Norms are specific to a social context, and they are generally defined in order to regulate the people relationships. Norms impose discipline to members, while members follow norms. System encompasses the means for the members to work in their activities and interact with other members. So, members interact with the system, whereas the system supports members. Each member in an online team characterizes an individual with his experiences, motives, objectives, and behavior. The external stimuli comprise norms, system, and external environment. The integrated model (Fig. 2) is useful to analyze the factors that influence motivation in online teams, as described in the next section.

3 Research Questions

In this section, we use the model in Fig. 2 to contextualize the importance of the three chosen motivating aspects investigated in this paper considering online teams: task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms.

In an online team, the participation (indicated as behavior in Fig. 2) of a member can be perceived through his/her performed tasks in the system. So, task is a relevant issue related to motivation. Characteristics regarding a task being developed by an online team can make the task more suitable to gather members’ participation. For instance, decomposability is an attribute that makes possible to structure the task into sub-tasks and engender dependences between members [29]. Autonomy is also important, insofar as team should be self-sufficient to solve the problem regardless of external resources. The complexity of a task is also impacting: a task should be complex enough to require interaction of members, but always considering members’ skills [8, 34]. These characteristics are important when defining a task to be performed by a team. A particular characteristic, which is task significance, is critical. According to Staples and Cameron [34], a task should be significant to members to make they believe in its importance and purpose. Regarding task significance, we are interesting to answer the following research questions:

Research Question 1 (RQ1): Is task significance an aspect that positively affects motivation in online teams?

Research Question 2 (RQ2): How to define a task with significance?

Figure 2 illustrates only one member, however in a team there are several members (with their particular characteristics) interacting through the system. Teamwork then presupposes collaboration, which is realized through communication and coordination supported by the system [12]. Collaboration follows the norms established for that team. Communication is required to make members exchange information, negotiate and take decisions. The virtual nature of communication makes online teams prone to problems, such as false interpretation of behavior in case of non-response of messages or incorrect use of text emphasis [5, 11]. Although communication issues can damage team motivation, they are more limiting to larger groups or virtual communities.

Coordination refers to the management of activities being carried out by members [15]. According Ellis et al. [12], coordination is the integration and harmonious adjustment of individual work efforts towards the accomplishment of a larger goal. Some studies indicate directives to enhance online coordination, for instance to specify intermediate deadlines and to promote training of members with the online environment previously [23]. Other studies have investigated organization types used by online teams, including fixed organization [29], self-organization [6], and shared leadership [32]. As coordination includes activities to organize members’ actions and interactions to accommodate task execution respecting its schedule, it can be impeditive to team success [3, 8]. In this way, we intend to answer the following research questions:

Research Question 3 (RQ3): Is coordination an aspect that positively affects motivation in online teams?

Research Question 4 (RQ4): Which characteristics can influence coordination quality?

Incentive mechanisms are a strategy to influence individuals by addressing their motivations, aiming to improve participation. So, according to Fig. 2, incentives need firstly to address motivations of the individuals. Incentive mechanisms then act on members’ motivation to induce a behavior. Research about motivation and incentives has been conducted considering both offline and online contexts of distinct teams and communities. In offline context, incentives are used, for example, in treatment of people with disorders [14, 38], and also to make employees reach better performance in organizations [28, 36]. In online context, incentives are applied, for instance, in areas as e-learning [17, 20], open-source software development [2, 13], and knowledge sharing [7, 9].

In case of online environments, incentive mechanisms are implemented in the system that supports members’ collaboration. Popular online incentive mechanisms are those related to performance appraisal (e.g., to inform the value of one’s participation) and social recognition (e.g., peer recognition, compliments, and praise) [21, 35]. Particular settings of online teams, such as those that belong to a company, can have intrinsic compensations (as monetary compensations or careers plans) that help moving members to participate. Teams based on volunteering face augmented challenges to promote participation [4, 27, 35]. In this paper, we aim to reason about the following research questions related to incentive mechanisms:

Research Question 5 (RQ5): Does the possibility of having incentive mechanisms positively affect motivation in online teams?

Research Question 6 (RQ6): Does the presence of incentive mechanisms positively affect motivation in online teams?

Related work investigates in a separated way the aspects of interest, including task significance, coordination and incentive mechanisms. Our objective is both to understand the relevance of these aspects to online motivation and consequently to team effectiveness, and to reason about the possible interference among such aspects. So we propose the additional research questions:

Research Question 7 (RQ7): How the aspects (task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms) are related to team effectiveness?

Research Question 8 (RQ8): Can the aspects (task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms) interfere in each other?

As we defined the research questions, the next section describe the experiment to explore such questions.

4 Experiment Design

In this section, we explain how the experiment was conducted using a qualitative approach. We describe the participants’ characteristics, the type of online task to be developed, as well as the provided online platform.

We invited 32 students of an Engineering college to participate in our research. Their ages range from 18 to 25. They were divided randomly in four teams of eight people. Here we call the teams as A, B, C and D. Each team should work online in a distinct environment keeping team independence. The online task was to specify a project to be developed by future students of the Programming course. The project should be edited collaboratively, and all discussions should be held online. Anonymity was maintained inside each team in order to eliminate possibility of offline interactions.

The online environments were designed using MediaWiki as platform. A project should then be defined as a wiki page. For discussions, members should use the respective talk page. We installed LiquidThreads extension to empower the talk page with resources commonly found in forums, such as reply button, and automatic relation between question and answers. Teams A and B used this system. Teams C and D used this system with incentive mechanisms included, as described below.

In order to select incentive mechanisms, we used the foundation about online needs (known as the motives in Fig. 2). The classical Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was adapted to the online context by Kim [25]. She explains each need as follows. Physiological need is related to system access, and the ability to participate online. Safety need, discussed together with the concept of security, refers basically to protection from hacking. Belonging is the need to be part of a group and to be accepted by it. Esteem refers to the need to be recognized by others due to participation. Self-actualization is the need to maximize own potential, by developing skills and opening up new opportunities. In the context of our experiment, physiological and safety needs are already satisfied with the designed system. Belonging needs are addressed since groups are defined and closed. We then focused on esteem and self-actualization needs.

We proposed three incentive mechanisms: “article feedback”, “contribution scores”, and “contribution appreciation”. With these mechanisms, we aim to stimulate members’ participation by allowing them, respectively, to receive feedback about their proposal, to be recognized by their contributions in the article, and to have their comments appreciated in discussions. Incentive mechanisms similar to these are commonly found in successful virtual communities, such as StackOverflow and Wikipedia [4]. They act mainly with motivations as prestige, visibility, reputation, recognition, competence, challenge seeking, and progress evaluation. The “article feedback” is a mechanism available as a MediaWiki extension. It allows readers to evaluate wiki articles using one to five stars. We invite other 10 students, different from team members, to act as readers and provide project feedback. The “contribution scores” mechanism is also a MediaWiki extension. It shows, at article footer, the names of members who contribute to article edition. We had to develop the “contribution appreciation” mechanism, which introduces “like” buttons in the questions and answers in a talk page with LiquidThreads extension.

The teams worked online during four weeks. At the end, each participant responded a questionnaire to evaluate his experience. Participants could also provide comments to explain their responses or to add new perspectives. In the next four sections, we detail the data collection and measures related to each investigated aspect. We also analyze the experiment results in order to respond the research questions.

5 Investigating Task Significance

Regarding the online task, we investigated the contribution of task significance to members’ motivation, as well as what made a task attractive. Table 1 shows the questions, in the form of affirmatives to be evaluated by participants, the response options, and the associated results.

The respondents should evaluate the affirmative: “Task significance contributes to my motivation”. The respondents should also evaluate if the following aspects contributed to task attractiveness: the “collaborative nature of the task”, the “elaboration of a programming project”, and the “possibility to use the project to future students”. For the answer, we used the options: “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree”, and “strongly agree”. The neutral option was removed to force respondents to make a decision, what is called the ‘forced choice’ method [1].

According to Table 1, a high percentage of participants (89 %) agreed or strongly agreed with the sentence “Task significance contributes to my motivation”, which shows the relevance of the task definition. Among the aspects that made the task attractive, 81.5 % participants agreed or strongly agreed that the collaborative nature of the task contributed. To elaborate a programming project was considered relevant to task attractiveness for 85.2 % of the participants. The possible usage of the project to future students made the task attractive for 88.9 % of the participants. The feedback of participants was similar in teams. We did not observed relevant differences in teams about task as a motivation factor.

We observed that participants were really motivated with the task itself and its characteristics. It is important to understand that these characteristics were relevant for those participants in that context. Participants were students in a Programming course, so their activities were in general the development of programs. To specify a project was then considered more appealing. Students of the chosen college live together in dorms, and they know each other. They found funny to design something to future colleagues to work on. It would be a mix of reception and retaliation to new students. Some participants reported that to participate in a research made them attracted to the task. Other participants commented that a positive aspect was the offline repercussion of their participation, since their roommates found the idea interesting and so they felt prestige.

Table 1. Questions and results regarding task significance.
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Regarding RQ1, we found that task significance is, in fact, an aspect that positively affects motivation in online teams. So, in order to motivate members of a virtual team to perform an online task, the main directive is that the task should be attractive to them. Responding RQ2, to propose an attractive task is a challenge. We need first to understand the characteristics of the members and the context where they are settled. The analysis can include both online and offline attributes. Online attributes that made the task attractive in that context include the intrinsic collaborative characteristic of the proposed task, as well as the type of task (project elaboration instead of project execution). In the experiment, participants found the task interesting due to the possibility to employ the outcome to colleagues in future. Participants were also proud to participate in the initiative. The repercussion of task results, and the reputation conquered for participating in a task are then examples of offline aspects that can also influence task significance.

6 Investigating Coordination

To reason about coordination, we asked about the contribution of the coordination satisfaction to members’ motivation. Table 2 shows the questions, in the form of affirmatives to be evaluated by participants, the response options, and the associated results.

Table 2. Questions and results regarding coordination.
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The respondents should evaluate the affirmative “Satisfaction with coordination contributes to my motivation”, using the options: “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree”, and “strongly agree”. We also asked participants to evaluate the following aspects: “team commitment”, “deadlines’ meeting”, and “activities’ division”. For these questions, the options of answer were: “very poor”, “poor”, “normal”, “good”, and “very good”. Besides, we collected the amount of comments presented in forum in order to analyze participation in the communication process as result of the coordination activities.

As detailed in Table 2, participants, in 74 % of the cases, agreed or strongly agreed with the sentence “Satisfaction with coordination contributes to my motivation”. The result shows that if people are satisfied with coordination, they can be more motivated and consequently perform better. Collaboration in teams revealed coordination problems related to “team commitment”, “deadlines’ meeting” and “activities’ division”. “Team commitment” to perform the task was considered “very poor” by 3.7 % of participants, “poor” by 22 %, “normal” by 44 %, “good” by 22 %, and “very good” by 8.3 %. Participants considered “deadlines’ meeting” as “poor” in 22.2 % of the cases, “normal” in 26 %, “good” in 26 %, and “very good” in 25.8 %. The main problem was the division of activities among members. Participants considered “activities’ division” “very poor” or “poor” in 78 % of the cases.

Teams explained how they organized themselves to perform the task collaboratively. The feedback was important to support the findings about problems related to task coordination. Team A commented that initially they discussed ideas of projects. After choosing a topic, one member elaborated a project and other members only complemented it. Before the end of the task, one member commented that the majority of the team stopped contributing. One member also assumed that he himself did not participate as desired. Similar problems were found in team B, where members discussed the initial ideas, but two members were mainly in charge of the project edition.

More aggravated problems were found in team C. In this team, one member gave the idea and practically elaborated the project alone. Other member mentioned that communication was difficult and suggested that to have few people in team could improve collaboration. One member commented that the online task demanded time to be accomplished and he was not available as expected. In team D, two members conducted the task by suggesting the theme and making the team develop the text. One member reported that he found grateful to collaborate online by exchanging experiences and observing others’ algorithms. Other member commented that he contributed to the project by both elaborating and improving the text. According to one member, the team was very motivated and engaged. Other member said that the team was a little disorganized. Time and internet availability were reported as factors that limited the participation of one member.

We observed that problems related to coordination were presented in all teams but with distinct severity levels. Regarding communication, the quantity of comments in the forum was the following: 34 in team A, 42 in team B, 20 in team C, and 86 in team D. We observed that team C, which demonstrated more coordination problems, communicated less. Team D, with better task coordination, communicated more. It shows the importance of communication in the collaboration process, especially to achieve better coordination.

Answering RQ3, coordination, when well conducted, is an aspect that positively affects motivation in online teams. We noted, in the experiment, that the volume of online communication can reveal collaboration issues. Regarding RQ4, we investigated three coordination issues: “team commitment”, “deadlines’ meeting” and “activities’ division”. A relevant problem regarding coordination was the unfair division of activities in teams, mainly due to lack of engagement. A relevant issue is then to engage members in activities that they feel confident to perform, in order to gather contributions to fulfill the entire task.

7 Investigating Incentive Mechanisms

Regarding incentive mechanisms, we designed different questions for teams without incentives (A and B) and teams with incentives (C and D). For teams A and B, we made the following questions about each mechanism: “Could the incentive mechanism be useful?” and “Could the incentive mechanism motivate you?”. For teams C and D, we asked: “Was the incentive mechanism useful?” and “Did the incentive mechanism motivate you?”. The response options were only “yes” or “no”. We also gathered comments about the systems that supported collaboration of the teams.

We analyzed the feedback of participants regarding the three developed incentive mechanisms: “article feedback”, “contribution scores”, and “contribution appreciation”. In Table 3, we present the quantity of members that agree with the utility and motivation potential of the incentive mechanisms. For instance, regarding “contribution scores”, in team D, 8 members said that it was useful and 6 members found it motivating. To better understand, we have to keep in mind that each team was composed by 8 members.

Table 3. Utility and motivation of incentive mechanisms.
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Teams A and B evaluated, in general, the incentive mechanisms as useful and they had a tendency to believe that mechanisms would be motivating. It shows that the incentive mechanisms were adequate to that context, and they really had a potential to motivate members. Comparing teams C and D, it is interesting to observe that both used the incentive mechanisms but they had very different experiences with them. Incentive mechanisms were more valuable for team D. We argue that coordination problems found in team C impacted, since members were not involved and did not use the mechanisms in fact. For instance, “contribution appreciation” mechanism is valuable if members contribute and they are able to evaluate others’ contribution. According to the feedback of team D about the incentive mechanisms, the “article feedback” mechanism was less motivating. In this case, there were impediments that constrained the usage of the mechanism and consequently affected its motivating potential, for instance, the reduced number of external readers and the short-time characteristic of the task.

Participants also reported their experience with the systems that supported the online teams. One member in team A said that wiki features were not simple to use. Other member in team A added that wiki page is not easy to deal with. As a member in team D explained, the problem was mainly how to format text in the page that is a little complicated. We used wikis as MediaWiki platform provides. Although it seems to work well in successful communities like Wikipedia, it has limitations related to usability as reported by some participants. According to participants, a positive point of the system was the forum. In this case, the usability problem of talk pages in MediaWiki was overcome by the use of LiquidThreads extension. The extension makes transparent the need to add formatting to keep tracking between questions and related comments. Usability can be seen as hygienic factor to deal with. A hygienic factor [19] refers to a factor whose the presence is not stimulating, but the absence can reduce motivation.

Incentive mechanisms can be used to stimulate participation. To propose incentive mechanisms, it is required firstly the identification of motives that drive members. In the experiment, for example, we proposed incentives related to prestige, recognition, and reputation. Regarding RQ5, in the experiment, the feedback of teams A and B shows that the possibility of having the proposed incentive mechanisms positively affects motivation. However, answering RQ6, to have the incentives is not always stimulating. It may have interference of other factors not related to the incentives themselves, as we discuss below.

8 Investigating Aspects’ Interplay and Team Effectiveness

We analyzed team effectiveness according both team performance and team satisfaction. Team performance is related to the delivery of a timely and high-quality product or service as result of online task. Team satisfaction is associated to the satisfaction of members after team interaction [22, 30]. In order to evaluate team performance, we asked two volunteers to act as evaluators by giving a grade (zero to ten) to team projects. Evaluators were students in the same college, but they were more experienced than the participants that performed the online task. They analyzed projects according to a defined criteria, which include: originality (if the project is different from the common programming activities), learning potential (if the project is able to improve programming learning in future students), attractiveness (if future students could be motivated to develop the project), and text quality (if the project is well written and easy to be understood). As team satisfaction is linked to the individual satisfaction of taking part of the team, we invited each participant to evaluate others’ performance in the same team. We used the following options: 1 (very poor), 2 (poor), 3 (normal), 4 (good), and 5 (very good). The mean of grades assigned to a member can then indicate the quality of participation of that member.

The evaluators assigned the following grades to projects designed by online teams: 8.5 to team A, 9.8 to team B, 9.5 to team C, and 9.5 to team D. We observed that teams reached good performance. Problems related to coordination were not perceived looking only the quality of the team outcome. For instance, team C even with challenges reached a great result. We argue that it happened because the online task had an intrinsic characteristic of creativity. Teams could overcome their internal problems and elaborate a project with quality.

To reason about team satisfaction, we compute the mean of the performance evaluations of each member. The evaluations were made by co-workers with grades from 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good). Results are shown in Table 4. The data can reveal collaboration challenges found in teams. For instance, in Sect. 6, we commented that two members were mainly in charge of the task execution in team B.

Table 4. Members’ assessment about team satisfaction.
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We can see in Table 2 that members M5 and M8 in team B were better evaluated than others. Other interesting case occurred in team D, where collaboration was reported to be more productive. We noted that three members (M1, M3 and M7) performed better, but others (as M4 and M6) also have their importance. The data regarding team satisfaction can also be misleading in case of problems with members’ engagement. For example, in team C, we identified the member (M2) who participated more. The other grades are uniform and near to 3 (average performance). It may be interpreted as a regular participation. However, in fact, it indicates that members who did not participate were not able to assess others.

As task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms influence motivation, they are also important to team effectiveness, confirming RQ7. However, it is difficult to assess the influence to team effectiveness of each aspect separately. In order to measure team effectiveness in the experiment, we used team satisfaction and team performance. Team satisfaction is a good thermometer of online participation, since it can reveal coordination problems related to engagement. We measured team performance by assessing the quality of the developed task. As this measure only analyzes the outcome, it cannot explain possible participation issues during the process. Regarding RQ8, we observed the problems related to coordination especially in team C, during the experiment. A poor coordination negatively impacted members already motivated by the task. It also made incentive mechanisms lose force, for example, a mechanism to appreciate others’ contributions is not useful if members do not contribute. We found that task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms can interfere in each other, in a way that a problem in one dimension can negatively affect others.

9 Conclusions

We used an experiment to investigate three aspects that influence motivation in online teams, including task significance, coordination, and incentive mechanisms. We also analyzed the impact of participation on team effectiveness, characterized by team performance and team satisfaction.

Task significance is essential to motivate members in online teams. It is the way to guarantee the initial attractiveness of members to participate online. Characteristics as task relevance and usefulness are then primordial. The quality of coordination is other aspect that influences online motivation. If the activity execution is well coordinated, the number of productive interactions increases, resulting in more motivated members. Disturbances in coordination can occur due to unfair division of activities among members, which ends up overloading some members. Problems with unequal participation among members can be revealed by team satisfaction, but obfuscated by analyzing only team performance.

Incentive mechanisms can be used to act on motivation and consequently improve participation. An effective identification of adequate tasks and design of effective incentive mechanisms have to consider members, their contexts, characteristics and intrinsic motives. Esteem and self-actualization needs constitute suitable categories of motivations to be addressed by online incentive mechanisms. Incentives mechanisms stimulate collaboration, when members are initially engaged, but if in the occurrence of problems, such as lack of coordination, the mechanisms are ineffective. So, incentive mechanisms work only if coordination and communication are properly assured.

The findings of our research are based on an experiment, so results and discussions should not be generalized, since they were drawn for a specific context. More experiments should be made in order to improve confidence on our initial results. We intend to expand our analysis by performing new experiments with more groups and distinct tasks. As future work, we plan to design features to promote online engagement in order to improve activities’ division, by allowing members to define activities and identify responsibility. Incentive mechanisms will be used to support this new environment. As there is no formal guidance to design incentive mechanism, one future work is the definition of a process with directives to help designers to propose incentive mechanisms to members in online teams and virtual communities. Directives should include discussions about context, characteristics, and motivations of members.