The Evolution of Globally-Distributed Teams: Organizational Learning and the role of Information Technology

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With Support from the National Science Foundation's Innovation and Organizational Change Program, this research focuses on social and technological factors that contribute to organizational teaming in virtual global teams. It is framed around several broad questions that address both theoretical and practitioner concerns:How do global teams evolve to share cognitive experience, exchange and internalize one another's tacit knowledge, and collaborate in ways that contribute to performance? What conditions enable this transformation?What roles do advanced information technologies play in the evolution of global teams, and especially in the processes of organizational teaming?What technological designs and implementation processes best enable the development of collaborative practices on global teams, and support new knowledge creation and organizational teaming? These questions are explored through a combination of qualitative, comparative, and quantitative methods that are employed to study global teams at Ford, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble. Methodologies include ethnographic fieldwork and direct observation of team practices, qualitative comparative analysis, survey research and statistical analysis, and simulation modeling.The results will help global teams communicate and coordinate their activities across boundaries of culture, time, and space. The findings may also be applied to collaborative teams in an educational context, with insights for multi-cultural collaborations and the utilization of information technology.