Non-optimized Temporal Structures as a Failure Factor in Virtual Teams

Despite the expected benefits of global virtual teams, their performance has been spotty and management continues to search for reasons why these teams fail. This work addresses this issue by performing a longitudinal case study of two virtual teams in order to uncover why one was more successful than the other. The study found that a key factor for one team?s poor performance was the entrainment of the temporal norms of both the countries and the social situations of the members that reduced the available real time meeting space to zero.

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