Abstract
Telematic technologies and group work. A psychosocial perspective. Psychosocial analysis of group processes and outcomes in mediated communication conditions has received a special attention by social scientists. This paper reviews the main contributions and put out achievements and limitations as well as future perspectives in this field. Since initial studies (Morley y Stephenson, 1977; Short et al., 1976), this research has been promoted a lot and comprehensive reviews on advances obtained have been carried out (Culnan Markus, 1987; Peiró y Prieto 1993; Andriessen 1991). During last decade, several former assumptions have been overcame and, at the same time, new problems have been progressively considered in accordance with growing sophistication of telemetric technologies, taking into account different communication media (electronic mail, videoconference, computer conference and group work support systems). Recently, has been emphasized the need for focusing research from a more wholistic and integrative perspective which considers interaction among group structure, tasks, media, group processes performance and other group outcomes, in order to possibilities its application to distributed teamwork. All these contributions will be specially relevants in a more frequent situation where work activities are strongly interrelated and interdependent.
