Disaggregating the Impacts of Virtuality on Team Identification

Team identification is an important predictor of team success. As teams become more virtual, team identification is expected to become more important. Yet, the dimensions of virtuality such as geographic dispersion, reliance on electronic communications and diversity in team membership can undermine team identification. To better understand the impact of virtuality, the authors conducted a study with 248 employees in 55 teams to examine the complex and codependent effects of virtuality. Result indicate that although geographic dispersion and perceived differences can undermine team identification, reliance on electronic communications increases team identification and weakens the negative relationship between perceived differences and team identification.National Science Foundation Grant CHS-1617820Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138817/4/Robert and You 2018https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138817/1/Old VersionDescription of Robert and You 2018 : Accepted VersionDescription of Old Version : Old Versio

Subgroup Formation in Human-Robot Teams

Subgroup formation is vital in understanding teamwork. It was not clear whether subgroup formation takes place in human-robot teams and what the implications of the subgroups might be for the team’s success. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with 44 teams of two people and two robots, where each team member worked with a robot to accomplish a team task. We found that subgroups were formed when team members identified with their robots and were inhibited when they identified with their team as a whole. Robot identification and team identification moderated the negative impacts of subgroup formation on teamwork quality and subsequent team performance

The impact of virtuality on team effectiveness in organizational and non‐organizational teams:A meta‐analysis

We meta-analytically assess the virtuality-team effectiveness relationship using 73 samples of organizational teams (5738 teams) reporting on a wide range of productive (e.g. earnings), performance (e.g. customer ratings), social (e.g. cohesion), and team member (e.g. project satisfaction) outcomes. Our results suggest that in work organizations, virtuality is not a direct input—negative or positive—to team effectiveness. In contrast, using 109 samples of non-organizational teams (5620 teams), we show that virtuality is a significant negative input to team effectiveness. We also meta-analytically assess the issue of results generalizability from non-organizational to organizational settings, and find that overall, results from non-organizational studies largely fail to generalize to organizational virtual teams. Using moderator analysis, we explore a number of study features that may explain the poor results generalizability from non-organizational to organizational studies. We find that results from non-organizational studies using undergraduate students, short team duration, and laboratory settings drive the non-generalizability effect, whereas results from non-organizational studies using graduate students, longer team duration, and classroom settings produce results comparable to those of organizational studies of virtual teams. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed