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The Impact of Knowledge Coordination on Virtual Team Performance Over Time
Abstract
As the role of virtual teams in organizations becomes increasingly important,
it is crucial that companies identify and leverage team members’ knowledge. Yet, little is known
of how virtual team members come to recognize one another’s knowledge, trust one another's
expertise and coordinate their knowledge effectively. In this study, we develop a model of how
three behavioral dimensions associated with transactive memory systems (TMS) in virtual teams –
expertise location, task-knowledge coordination and cognition-based trust – and their impacts on
team performance change over time. Drawing on the data from a study that involves 38 virtual
teams of MBA students performing a complex web-based business simulation game over an 8-week
period, we found that in the early stage of the project, the frequency and volume of
task-oriented communications among team members played an important role in forming expertise
location and cognition-based trust. Once TMS were established, however, task-oriented
communication became less important. Instead, toward the end of the project, task-knowledge
coordination emerges as a key construct that influences team performance, mediating the impact
of all other constructs. Our study demonstrates that TMS can be formed even in virtual team
environments where interactions take place solely through electronic media, although they take
a relatively long time to develop. Furthermore, our findings show that, once developed, TMS
become essential to performing tasks effectively in virtual teams.
Published December 2007 (Volume 31, Number 4) in:
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