The emergence of a theoretical framework for gss facilitation: The dualities of e‐facilitation

Abstract

Electronic meeting facilitation (e‐facilitation) continues to be a critical success factor in the use of information technology to support face‐to‐face collaborative work. Yet researchers and practitioners continue to struggle to understand the subtleties and difficulties in the application of meeting facilitation techniques in the ‘electronic’ context. To clarify that understanding, this paper develops a new theoretical framework that examines how technology interacts with human facilitator behavior in an electronic group meeting. This framework, The Dualities of E‐Facilitation, is composed of two dualities: the Duality of Computer and Human Interaction, and the Duality of Routine and Intuitive Actions. The framework emerged from an analysis of the e‐facilitation behaviors of newly trained face‐to‐face electronic meeting facilitators.