Abstract
As technology improves, it is increasingly common for individuals with diverse demographic backgrounds to collaborate through computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies. Groups with internal diversity are typically considered to be advantageous to group performance due to the presence of different perspectives and the potential to stimulate new ideas. However, intergroup conflicts can also occur in diverse groups, especially for groups with imbalanced composition. Previous studies have pointed out that the minority members in groups often suffer from unequal participation and performance pressure, which may further decrease group outcome. Since CMC tools make online collaboration happen more frequently, it is necessary to understand how the affordance of different communication media influences heterogeneous groups’ collaboration. In this study, we focused on gender diversity and test with three different gender compositions (female-majority, equal-gender-composition, male-majority) using two different communication media (video-text, text-only). Our findings show that both gender composition and communication medium can influence group performance and collaboration. Design implications for online collaboration are provided based on our findings.