VOSS: Collaborative Research: Virtual teams, knowledge management, and team performance

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Many knowledge-based organizations depend on virtual teams, whose membership is neither co-located nor stable, to complete the work of the organization. Team dispersion creates unique operational challenges. This project will implement a longitudinal field study to examine virtual team functioning in a demanding, knowledge-intensive organization. The empirical analysis will include five years of development projects (over 1,500 projects) completed by virtual teams (consisting of over 15,000 individuals). The analysis will examine how various team and project factors (e.g., team size, familiarity with other members, project complexity) and degree of team virtuality (e.g., team geographic dispersion, team temporal dispersion, and team member turnover) either directly affect or interact to affect multiple team outcomes (on time, on budget, quality, customer satisfaction). Qualitative interviews will be conducted to add depth and detail to the empirical analysis.

In addition to examining virtual team functioning, this research project will also explore how the use of a dynamic knowledge management system may resolve the knowledge coordination problems that virtual teams face. The benefits afforded by a knowledge management system are known to be limited by a complex interaction of social and technological factors. Combining team performance data with data captured from the organization?s knowledge management system, we will examine social factors that predict system usage. We will also examine whether system usage by team members addresses the mutual knowledge problem and thus results in improved team performance. Finally, we will implement a field experiment to examine social factors that contribute to knowledge management system adoption and habit formation (i.e., ongoing usage of the system).

Organizational work is growing increasingly dependent on output from virtual teams. When functioning effectively, virtual teams afford immense benefit by providing opportunity to strategically select team members to maximize team knowledge or skill, or to minimize personnel cost. Yet virtual teams often fail to live up to their potential or fail completely because of the coordination challenges and process difficulties that virtuality can create. This project will advance the theory of virtual team functioning, thereby aiding organizations in better structuring and managing virtual teams in order to improve team performance.