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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.
This dissertation examines the role tangible resources play in innovation projects. Specifically, it is distinguished between two mindsets when it comes to tangible resource constraints in innovation projects. One mindset regarding the relationship between tangible resources and innovation project performance can be described best as “resource driven”, meaning that innovation project performance is strongly linked to the presence of adequate tangible resource input. Counter-intuitively, a vast number of case examples suggest the exact opposite, though. The underlying “less is more” mindset suggests that innovation project performance could also be achieved because (not despite) of constrained tangible resources. Those views reflect the two extremes of the continuous variable “tangible resource orientation” which expresses the perceived dependency on tangible resources in order to achieve a high level of performance in innovation projects.
Since conceptual and empirical evidence on the antecedents and consequences of varying degrees of tangible resource adequacy in extant literature is inconclusive, this dissertation aims at disentangling the ambiguous tangible resources-innovation project performance relationship. The arguments I put forward in this dissertation are based on conceptual evidence as a result of synthesizing literature from neighboring research fields like cognitive psychology, entrepreneurship, and corporate strategy pointing to mechanisms which cause material resource constraints to facilitate creative and innovative performance in innovation projects. These literature streams are then brought together within the framework of the resource based view (RBV) of the firm. The empirical analyses to test the hypothesized relationships are based on a sample consisting of 121 innovation project teams from the electronics industry.
The results presented in this dissertation show that the ambiguity of the relationship between tangible resources and innovation project performance observed in the literature may be a result of moderating variables that determine the direction and strength of tangible resources’ influence on innovation project performance. Specifically, the analyses reveal an interaction effect in that perceptions of material resource adequacy indeed may entail diverging effects on innovation project outcomes in family and non-family businesses, depending on differences in these firms’ organizational culture regarding the orientation toward material resources. In particular, innovation projects in non-family firms do Extended summary III significantly better when being provided with more adequate material resources, while in family firms innovation projects do not show significant differences in conditions of more or less adequate tangible resources and are shown to perform better (relative to those in nonfamily firms) under conditions of perceived material resource inadequacy.
Moreover the results of this dissertation point to the influence of socio-cognitive factors on a team’s evaluation of material resource adequacy. These socio-cognitive influences are further shown to root both on innovation project team attributes and capabilities, as well as on characteristics of organizational culture. Specifically, regarding team-level factors, it is found that innovation project team members’ perception of material resource adequacy is influenced by a team’s action repertoire, the belief of a team being able to accomplish a task, and the team task’s work volume. Regarding organizational-level factors, this research reveals that innovation project teams in family firms perceived their material resource provisions generally as being more adequate. Further, this relationship is shown to be mediated by an organization’s cultural characteristic of material resource orientation, representing an important link that transmits family influence to innovation project teams’ perceptions of material resource adequacy.
Finally, the results reveal that depending on which outcome dimension is operationalized as the main project focus, i.e., whether the quality or innovativeness of the developed products is used as outcome measure, converse results may emerge. Specifically, it is found that perceptions of material resource adequacy have a positive effect on new product quality and a negative effect on new product novelty. In a similar vein, relative team size is shown to be negatively related with new product novelty while showing a positive relationship with new product quality. Additionally, relative team size is also found to have a positive relationship with project efficiency.
From these findings, key implications for the management of innovation projects are derived in order to ensure the effectiveness of companies’ investments in R&D, showing that adequate tangible resources per se do not have a direct effect (neither positive nor negative) on innovation project performance. Rather, the role of tangible resources in innovation projects is contingent upon how adequate tangible resources are perceived to be, on certain contingency variables, and on the outcome dimension focused on. Thus, sometimes less may indeed turn out to be more and this thesis points to ways how to tap this potential.