Integrating Managerial Preferences into the Qualitative Evaluation of Virtual Team Member

Effective teaming depends on the abilities and attributes of the team members, and also on the the context of the organization and group. The importance of team member attributes varies with domain and within a profession. Team managers may display different preferences as to the ideal composition of qualities possessed by good team members.To enable managers to elucidate these various qualities, we propose an innovative methodology based on multi-criteria decision aiding techniques. Using this method, we are able to elicit the characteristics of a good, acceptable or bad contributor and infer a model based on a manager's evaluation of example contributors. We have carried out experiments of our proposed method, which demonstrates that while a set of characteristics can be identified for a domain, different managers are concerned with different subsets of the full set. Even when working with the same subset, they come to different conclusions about the relative importance of the attributes. Our approach, which has been applied to community managers of Free/Libre and Open Source Software communities as an example of a team-based organizations, is transferable to any teaming situation or other elicitations of multi-criteria selection