Yaguang Zhu, assistant professor in the Department of Communication of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, received the Top Paper Award from the Group Communication Division at the National Communication Association.

The award was presented virtually during the NCA 106th Annual Convention, held Nov. 19-22.

Zhu's paper, "Social Media Affordances and Transactive Memory System in Virtual Teams," focuses on recent advances in social media technologies that offer a variety of tools for virtual teams to facilitate knowledge sharing among their team members.

For example, popular team collaboration platforms, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, have been adopted by more than one million organizations around the globe. Team-based social media platforms offer a variety of communication and collaboration features including multiple channels of communication and file sharing tools, allowing for both formal and informal knowledge sharing between members.

Systems like Slack, where a history of communication and collaboration is preserved and trackable, presents teams with unprecedented infrastructures that enable team members to more easily manage their collective knowledge.

By adopting a media affordances lens, the current study investigates how team-based social media and their affordances affect the development of Transactive Memory System (TMS), a collective cognitive map of who knows what and who does what, and the quality of team performance.

Survey data with 339 participants in virtual teams across multiple Hackathon events reveals that social media affordances positively affect team performance, and this relationship is mediated by TMS development. Furthermore, the types of affordance have disparate effects on TMS accuracy, sharedness, and validation.

The findings provide practical implications for how virtual teams might appropriate social media technologies for their TMS development and team collaboration.

Stephanie Schulte, chair of the Department of Communication, noted, "Achieving national recognition for his social media research is a great accomplishment for Dr. Zhu." 

For more information, visit the National Communication Association online.