Beyond Being There: How presence shapes group work in virtual reality

· by · in The Academic Eye. ·
Beyond Being There: How presence shapes group work in virtual reality Virtual reality has entered the modern workplace with an almost utopian promise. Put on a headset and the distance disappears. Colleagues separated by continents share the same room, the same space, the same moment. But organisations have learned to be sceptical of technology that promises to change everything. And beneath the excitement, a more precise question is starting to surface. Does the feeling of being present in a virtual environment make teams work better together? And if it does, what is it about that feeling that matters most? Stepping into this overlooked corner of the virtual work debate, Professor Ayushi Tandon from Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, together with Profs Yogini Joglekar from Edustutia and Sabra Brock from Touro University explore how the experience of presence inside VR quietly shapes the way groups think, collaborate and perform.

Virtual reality (VR) has entered the modern workplace with an almost utopian promise. Put on a headset and the distance disappears. Colleagues separated by continents share the same room, the same space, the same moment.

But organisations have learned to be sceptical of technology that promises to change everything. And beneath the excitement, a more precise question is starting to surface. Does the feeling of being present in a virtual environment make teams work better together? And if it does, what is it about that feeling that matters most?

Stepping into this overlooked corner of the virtual work debate, Professor Ayushi Tandon from Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, together with Profs Yogini Joglekar at Edustutia and Sabra Brock from Touro University explore how the experience of presence inside VR quietly shapes the way groups think, collaborate and perform.

Beyond Being There: How presence shapes group work in virtual reality by CoBS Editor Hari Chandana Chinni. Related research: Tandon, A., Joglekar, Y., & Brock, S. (2025). Fostering Group Work in Virtual Reality Environments: Is Presence Enough?. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 57, 1301-1350. https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.05548

Virtual Reality technology has earned a solid reputation as a tool for individual learning. Its ability to create a powerful sense of presence, that subjective feeling of genuinely being somewhere, has been shown repeatedly to drive engagement and improve outcomes across healthcare, corporate training and higher education. But organisations do not learn alone. Teams do. And whether that same sense of presence can meaningfully improve how groups work together inside a VR environment has, until now, remained largely untested.

A new study by Profs. Tandon, Joglekar and Brock investigate precisely this question. Drawing on Construal Level Theory, the research examines how three dimensions of presence, namely spatial, social and temporal, shape group dynamics within a professional development VR platform.

The findings confirm that presence matters for group-level outcomes, but they also reveal an important moderating role for how well the VR technology fits the tasks it is being asked to support.

Presence Is Not One Thing. It Is Three

Construal Level Theory proposes that psychological distance – how close or far we feel from people, places and moments – shapes how we think and behave. In the VR context, this theory frames presence as the experiential manifestation of low psychological distance. The study operationalises presence across three distinct dimensions, each with its own implications for group work.

Spatial Presence in VR: The Sensation of Sharing a Physical Space

Spatial presence is the feeling of genuinely being somewhere, of occupying space meaningfully and interacting with one’s surroundings in an authentic way. In the VR campus studied, participants reported experiencing this through interactions with three-dimensional objects, lifelike environments such as a virtual boardroom or spice market, and spatial audio that placed other participants’ voices directionally around the room.

This sense of realism translated into concrete group behaviours: reduced multitasking, stronger mutual attention and more focused coordination during shared tasks.

Participants also noted that VR’s spatial properties made them feel as though globally dispersed colleagues were genuinely present in the same room, a perception that supported both cohesion and task performance.

Social Presence in VR: Interdependence, Skills and Accountability

Social presence in VR (Virtual reality): First, participants experienced interdependence through shared sensory activities such as eating popcorn, singing karaoke, avatar customisation and collaborative object manipulation. Second, the mix of VR skill levels across group members created natural skill-based interdependence, with more experienced users helping novices navigate the platform and building relational closeness in the process. Third, VR's transparency, including the visibility of where avatars were looking and whether a headset was active, heightened accountability in ways that video conferencing tools did not.

Social presence, the sense of being with others and perceiving their intentions, capabilities and reactions, was found to operate through three identifiable channels in the VR environment.

First, participants experienced interdependence through shared sensory activities such as eating popcorn, singing karaoke, avatar customisation and collaborative object manipulation.

Second, the mix of VR skill levels across group members created natural skill-based interdependence, with more experienced users helping novices navigate the platform and building relational closeness in the process.

Third, VR’s transparency, including the visibility of where avatars were looking and whether a headset was active, heightened accountability in ways that video conferencing tools did not.

An additional finding concerns the role of avatars in enabling candid feedback. Several participants reported that directing criticism at an avatar rather than a physical person reduced their inhibition and made them more open to both giving and receiving direct feedback. This is a property with clear implications for conflict resolution and performance coaching in distributed teams.

Temporal Presence: The VR Time Warp

Temporal presence, the subjective alignment with the time depicted in VR, emerged as a double-edged phenomenon. Participants consistently reported losing track of real-world time once immersed, describing VR as producing a time warp in which thirty minutes could feel like ten.

For group coordination, this had a net positive effect: the reduction of time zone salience allowed globally dispersed participants to feel synchronised in a shared temporal experience, supporting real-time collaboration.

However, the data did not establish a direct link between temporal presence and global group dynamics such as overall cohesion or task performance. The authors attribute this to the context-dependency of temporal effects and the disorientation that can accompany exit from VR. The practical implication is that sessions should be designed to capitalise on temporal immersion without exceeding the thirty-to-forty-five-minute window beyond which physical discomfort and temporal disorientation begin to undermine the experience.

Temporal Presence: The VR Time Warp: Temporal presence, the subjective alignment with the time depicted in VR, emerged as a double-edged phenomenon. Participants consistently reported losing track of real-world time once immersed, describing VR as producing a time warp in which thirty minutes could feel like ten. For group coordination, this had a net positive effect: the reduction of time zone salience allowed globally dispersed participants to feel synchronised in a shared temporal experience, supporting real-time collaboration.

VR Task-Technology Fit: The Factor That Determines Whether Presence Pays Off

The study’s most policy-relevant finding is that the positive relationship between presence and group dynamics is not automatic. It is moderated by how well VR technology fits the demands of the task it is being used to support. When alignment is strong, the three dimensions of presence reinforce each other and produce meaningfully better coordination, collaboration and cohesion. When alignment is weak, VR’s limitations can actively disrupt the group process.

Prof. Tandon et al’s research identifies several task types that leverage VR features well: creative brainstorming using spatial three-dimensional drawing tools, role-play and simulation exercises, rapport-building and team formation activities, and tasks that benefit from the accountability effects of avatar visibility.

Conversely, tasks that require extensive notetaking, documentation or rapid text-based communication are poorly served by current VR platforms, which lack robust keyboard input. Groups engaged in these activities tended to migrate to video conferencing tools mid-session, disrupting both spatial and temporal presence in the process.

Sessions longer than forty-five to sixty minutes ran into hardware constraints as well, with battery life, headset weight and eye strain becoming practical barriers that eroded immersion and impaired coordination.

The study draws a useful distinction between VR’s suitability across Tuckman’s classic stages of group development. VR appears well matched to the forming, storming and performing stages, supporting initial bonding, productive disagreement through the buffer of avatar identity, and focused collaborative execution. The norming stage, which typically involves detailed task allocation and documentation, is less well supported by current VR features and benefits from supplementation with conventional platforms.

What This Means for Organisations

For organisations evaluating or expanding their use of VR for professional development and team collaboration, the research offers a clear set of conclusions. Presence in VR is not a binary property. It is a composite of spatial, social and temporal experiences, each of which can be engineered or undermined by task design choices.

VR is not a universal replacement for existing collaboration tools. Its comparative advantages lie in creating embodied, accountable, low-distance group experiences, advantages that are most pronounced in forming and performing stages of team development, in globally distributed teams, and in contexts where psychological safety and perspective-taking are strategic objectives.

Investment in VR for group work should be accompanied by deliberate task design that aligns activities with the technological capabilities of the platform. Treating VR as a straightforward substitute for a video call without adjusting the task structure is likely to produce disappointing results. The technology rewards intention. When tasks are designed around what VR does well, the returns in group dynamics are real.

Ayushi Tandon, Trinity Business School
Ayushi Tandon

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