Organizations should be aware of deceptive behavior among both job applicants and employees, and should be prepared to deal with it appropriately, according to recent studies published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal devoted to applied research on professional communication.

In separate studies published in 2008 and later this year, Kent Marett, an assistant professor at Mississippi State, and colleagues at other academic institutions involved students in voluntary studies designed to gauge deceptive communication.

The first study completed with colleagues at Florida State and Connecticut State universities, evaluated the ability of interviewers to detect falsehoods in applicants' resume-listed qualifications, focusing on e-mail, instant messaging, chat, and text messaging.

Groups of students were assigned the role of interviewer or job applicant. Half of the interviewers were warned job applicants sometimes lie; half were not. All were asked to determine the accuracy of job applicants' qualifications. Applicants, on the other hand, were instructed to make their resumes "competitive."

"In an increasingly 'virtual' world, this research has more relevance than ever," Marett observed. "With tight budgets, more companies are doing 'virtual' interviews with applicants they don't meet face to face, and we found deception is more difficult to detect online."

The second study, conducted in collaboration with faculty at Louisiana Tech and Illinois State universities, and soon to be published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, examined the effect of deception in virtual "teams”. The goal was to test the impact of deception in group decision-making.

"We put together a virtual battleship game and introduced a rogue member whose instructions were to sabotage the game by using deceptive information," Marett said. Because players could earn a small amount of money, there was an incentive to win, he added.

Researchers found that one deceptive player—even if undetected—could have dramatic negative effects on a team's performance. In the battlefield game study, the team with a rogue player missed targets 72 percent of the time, compared to 33 percent in the control group.

Equally important, the study found deception that is detected by a fellow team member also damages credibility and trustworthiness within the team, even if it doesn't impact performance.

"Even if someone raises suspicions, they often get the benefit of the doubt in an online environment," the Florida State University doctoral graduate said. Conducting what they believe to be the first study in this area, the multi-school research teams agreed that future investigations should delve further into effects of deception and other disruptive influences on virtual team behavior and performance.