Feedback as intervention for team learning in virtual teams: the role of team cohesion and personality

Scholars and practitioners agree that virtual teams (VTs) have become commonplace in today's digital workplace. Relevant literature argues that learning constitutes a significant contributor to team member satisfaction and performance, and that, at least in face-to-face teams, team cohesion fosters team learning. Given the additional challenges VTs face, e.g. geographical dispersion, which are likely have a negative influence on cohesion, in this paper we shed light on the relationship between team cohesion and team learning. We adopted a quantitative approach and studied 54 VTs in our quest to understand the role of feedback in mediating this relationship and, more specifically, the role of personality traits in moderating the indirect effect of team feedback and guided reflection intervention on TL through team cohesion within the VT context. Our findings highlight the importance of considering aspects related to the team composition when devising intervention strategies for VTs, and provide empirical support for an interactionist model between personality and emergent states such as cohesion. Implications for theory and practice are also discussed

Evaluating the effectiveness of a novel team development intervention on teamwork

The aim of the present research was to determine whether a brief, domain agnostic team training intervention could improve the teamwork of newly formed teams. Eight teams of five participants received training in submarine command and control before being randomly assigned to receive either a teamwork training intervention, or a cognitively matched control. Teamwork behaviors were measured during task performance pre- and post-intervention via observer-rated frequency counts. Preliminary analyses suggest that teams who received this novel intervention improved teamwork behaviors to a greater extent than control teams