Publications

Journal Article

Virtual teams are essential to the functioning of an increasing number of organizations. They have been the subject of much research, resulting in a growing body of literature on the topic. Nevertheless, we still lack an integrated understanding of what drives virtual team dynamics and ultimately effectiveness.

A key obstacle to achieving such understanding is the lack of an integrative theory-driven framework through which we can organize and make sense of prior, and guide future, research.

The authors build on existing models of effectiveness and emergent processes and states that have been applied to traditional teams and use these to generate a framework for understanding virtual team dynamics.

The authors then use this framework to structure a review and synthesis of empirical studies of virtual teams published between 1990 and 2011.

Using vote-counting analysis, the authors assess and integrate these findings to provide insights into the direct and indirect antecedents of virtual team effectiveness.

Based on this model, the authors highlight key gaps in both our knowledge of, and approach to studying, virtual teams. The authors outline areas for future research, provide managerial recommendations, and highlight implications for the study of both virtual and traditional teams.