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Distance in work teams has become a cornerstone of today’s business world as well as a fundamental research area. It has also become a prevalent team design factor that enables managers to combine the knowledge and skills of far-flung employees together in one team and, thus, to leverage their performance. However, it is not yet clear whether and how distance affects intra-team dynamics and performance. This dissertation addresses this fundamental research gap and explores the consequences of distance in teams and how virtual teams can overcome the bur-dens of virtual collaboration. More precisely, there are three burning issues addressed with regard to dispersed team dynamics: the perception of distance versus proximity, virtual teamwork processes, and the impact of the team context. In practice, it has been shown that the inadequate management of these issues plays a crucial role when virtual teams fall behind managers’ expectations. However, practitioners to date have only limited knowledge how to handle these factors of virtual team performance effectively, due to the severe research gaps associated with these issues. Accordingly, this study’s approach to explaining virtual team performance is built on these three focused elements of virtual collaboration.
Adopting this research focus, the empirical part of this work is structured into four research papers that empirically investigate whether and how perceived distance, team processes, and the team context may become critical for virtual team performance and the extent to which practitioners can build on these three success factors to optimize distributed work. The empirical analyses to these questions are based on a sample consisting of 161 software development teams with varying degrees of geographic dispersion.
The results presented in this dissertation clearly show that team processes, the perception of distance, and the team context matter for virtual team effectiveness. The research results of this study revealed team processes to be the key drivers of virtual team performance. In fact, virtual teams with high-level collaborative team processes are able to outperform their co-located counterparts, even those with the same quality of team processes. Teams with poor team processes, in contrast, suffer heavily from dispersion and underperform co-located teams with the same (low) levels of these processes. Thus, the effect of dispersion is not necessarily detrimental to team performance but rather depends on the quality of task-related team processes.
The analyses further show that it seems not (only) to be the actual degree of geographic dispersion that affects virtual team dynamics but rather the perceived level of distance between the members of a team. By exploring its antecedents, distance perceptions turned out to be mental states that emanate from complex and more socially-based constructions of the reality and are significantly affected by team members’ national heterogeneity. This finding illustrates the need to include the social aspects of dispersion in future research on dispersed team functioning. For executives, this finding offers new opportunities how to reap the benefits of virtual collaboration without efforts of bringing team members together face-to-face.
A third antecedent of virtual team dynamics turned out to be the organizational context. The organizational context has been shown to affect virtual team performance more indirectly by changing the conditions in which team members collaborate. In this dissertation, two paths have been identified of how the organizational context impacts virtual team functioning. First, organ-izational context variables such as the degree of formalization facilitate the perception of proximity even for team members being geographically strongly dispersed. Second, the organizational context can facilitate virtual team performance by creating an environment for superior dispersed collaboration quality. These context-related findings show that the larger organizational environment can help distributed teams to cope with the liabilities of distance more effectively. In particular, there are distinct and manageable attributes of the organizational context that can be addressed to help team members developing perceptions of interpersonal closeness as well as to perform high-level dispersed teamwork.
The results of this dissertation offer both considerable contributions to the extant literature on virtual team dynamics and guidance for the formulation of best-practices in virtual team management. In the end, all presented theoretical models and corresponding research results help to learn more about virtual teams – especially about their dynamics and the antecedents of their performance.
Servant Leadership in der IT
(2017)
Any innovation process naturally goes hand in hand with a strong potential for failure. Up to as many as 90% of all innovation projects fall to termination before their successful completion, with even higher termination rates in the pharmaceutical industry. Such terminations can have detrimental effects on the project members involved. Yet, surprisingly, as project members make up the most important reason for the success of innovations, research has hitherto scarcely noted the human side of innovation project terminations. Consequently, this study aims to analyze how to retain the innovative functioning of project members after such setbacks.
This dissertation develops a framework to study the processes involved and analyze the influence of termination characteristics on project members. Resilience, or positive adaptation despite adversity, serves as the dissertation’s underlying framework and is adapted to the innovation context. To measure the resilience of project members after termination and to analyze the influence of termination characteristics on resilience, this dissertation develops the resilience construct innovator resilience potential (IRP), embedded in the innovator resilience (IR) framework. Herein, IRP stands for the potential in individuals for future innovative functioning and coping with future setbacks. The IRP construct consists of six malleable facets: self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, hope, optimism, self-esteem, and risk propensity.
This dissertation theoretically develops and tests this definition and operationalization of IRP in a qualitative and a quantitative study. The qualitative study was conducted in a world-wide operating hospitality company that underwent a large-scale innovation project termination. The quantitative field study took place as an online questionnaire that 238 innovators completed entirely (180 innovators had experienced an innovation project termination). A total of 326 innovators completed the first part of the questionnaire regarding IRP. After developing IRP in the qualitative study, it became operationalized, tested, and validated in the quantitative study. Furthermore, the quantitative field study tested the relationship of IRP with future innovative functioning, which has great importance for the success of future innovation projects. A second step identifies factors influencing IRP.
The outcomes of the quantitative field study show that IRP strongly relates to project commitment, which represents future innovative functioning of project members, as project commitment is important for the success of innovation projects. The strong relationship hinges on having experienced a termination beforehand. Therefore, IRP is important in the ongoing work of innovators following an innovation project termination. It is thus important to strengthen IRP after a termination, as this has a strong relationship with project commitment and as such future innovative functioning. Furthermore, this dissertation identifies social support as an influencing factor on IRP. More precisely, emotional support of the leader and organizational support provided through a climate of psychological safety strongly relate to IRP. In contrast, the support from family and friends does not relate to IRP. The dissertation found only work-related social support to strongly influence IRP. These findings result in theoretical and practical implications on how best to support project members during and after an innovation project termination.
In addition, the general practical discussion of this dissertation presents five steps leading to IRP and guidelines for a post termination debriefing to provide leaders with practical advice. The theoretical findings suggest that IRP can be used to measure the influence of innovation project terminations on project members and that IRP is important for future innovative functioning and for future coping of project members. The findings build the basis for future research in this nascent research field.