Nick Yee and colleagues at PARC have been looking at collaborative building in Second Life. Collaborative work in virtual reality environments has been studied over the past decades, so there is a lot of work to compare against.
The final sentence summarises things nicely:
Rather than tweak the environment to force real-world styles of collaboration, more might be gained by improving aspects of collaboration that users find troublesome, such as the permission system which currently prevents objects which have been made by different individuals from being linked together.
