Information Technology Outsourcing and Virtual Team

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of IT outsourcing which entails collaboration among geographically distributed teams. Therefore, a good understanding of the performance of virtual teams can largely contribute to the IT outsourcing practice. Taking into account three potential factors (task, technology, and time) that help to manifest the performance of virtual teams, the authors designed a three-week experiment involving eight virtual teams and eight face-to-face (FTF) teams at two major universities to uncover the aspects in which virtual teams under-perform. Results indicate that mission clarity, group cohesion, and personal satisfaction were significantly different between virtual teams and FTF teams. Implications of the findings for IT outsourcing are discussed.

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