Exploring the Concept of Para Social Presence in Virtual Project Teams

Though contemporary research has testified to the importance of social presence in influencing the format and structure of group processes, its unidimensional nature and inability to accommodate asynchronous communication has eroded its relevance in the face of more sophisticated IT-based collaborative networks such as virtual project teams. Kumar and Benbasat [25, 26] thus advanced the notion of Para Social Presence (PSP) as a broader, encompassing concept that overcomes the aforementioned weaknesses inherent in the existing social presence construct. Yet to-date, there has not been a theoretical and empirical validation of the pertinent of the PSP construct when applied to more dynamic group configurations as claimed. To this end, this study reviews extant literature to first establish whether the PSP construct is meaningful conceptually and then empirically validates its measurement properties over time through a temporal field experimentation setting.