Files
Abstract
Todays knowledge economy relies on working across vast distances without having to constantly travel from location to location. Teams develop and deliver products virtually, particularly in knowledge industries like information systems (IS) development. Getting the most out of knowledge workers in these virtual settings presents formidable challenges. One key challenge is how to best use information and communication technologies to improve team interaction and project outcomes, and technology facilitation offers a lever for achieving this improvement. No prior study has addressed technology facilitation in virtual teams (VTs). This study filled this gap. This study framed the virtual teams literature using adaptive structuration theory (AST) to create effective questions for 2-hour interviews with 13 practicing, successful virtual team leaders currently working in large IS development projects. These leaders were high-performers. Eleven of them reported being used as fixers, project leaders their firms called when things went wrong in a project. The 30 projects they reported contained team members from four organizations and three national cultures on average. Their median monthly budget was $625,000, and they used more than 12 information and communication technologies (ICTs) per project, a number larger than prior literature had reported. The study employed critical incident technique (CIT) as the methodology underlying this application of AST, finding a very strong fit between CITs ability to sample technology appropriation and ASTs need to focus on the actors and moves of appropriation in order to establish the events in a structuring episode. CIT directs the application of interviews for examining a job role, in this case virtual team leader technology facilitation. This role had not been studied before, and few studies had even attempted to focus on actors and moves within the appropriation process in the AST literature perhaps due to the difficulty of doing so. The AST-CIT fit developed here offers a valuable guide for future research. It enables an actor-move emphasis to be examined using practicing VT leaders or members. The 30 projects and 52 critical incidents reported by the interviewees yielded 510 pages of transcribed data. The data were content analyzed in a careful process involving multiple coders to ensure validity. Through this process these data developed into dimensionalized constructs grounded in empirical observations from the field that describe the process of technology facilitation in virtual teams. These five constructs are: 1) structural triggers of technology facilitation, 2) leader actions, 3) structural changes, 4) team outcomes due to structural changes impact on work, and 5) beliefs within leaders mental models of technology facilitation. Important findings include descriptions of these constructs and how they work, identification and definition of participation and information processing capacity as a chief