The Effects of National Culture and Anonymity on Flaming and Criticalness in GSS-Supported Discussions

Abstract

Technologies for supporting collaborative work are often developed to improve various aspects of group performance such as idea generation and decision quality; however, less attention has been given to the effects that such technology has upon the nature of group communication. In this article, we examine the phenomena of flaming and comment criticalness in computer-mediated communication as they occur in group support systems (GSS) supported discussions. A 2 X 2 factorial experimental design was used to examine the effects of national culture (U.S. and Hong Kong) and anonymity (identified and anonymous pen name) on the number of comments classified as flames and on the number of comments classified as critical in 39 GSS discussions. Experimental results indicate that both national culture and anonymity influence the number of critical comments occurring in such discussions. However, the findings were not significant with respect to the number of comments categorized as flames.