A comparison of team developmental stages, trust and performance for virtual versus face-to-face teams

This study is an empirical analysis that compares virtual with face-to-face teams on team trust, performance issues and team developmental stages. The study uses data collected both before teams were formed and after teams completed their project deliverable. Pre-task measures include individual disposition to trust and initial team trust. Upon completion of their deliverable, team members responded to post-task measures on motivation, team trust and teamwork dynamics. In addition to these attitudinal comparisons, we investigate how teams spent their time during the completion of their team task. We examine potential differences in the percentage of time spent in each of the classic team formation stages (forming, storming, norming and performing). Team members also reported the total time spent completing the deliverable as well as time spent using various communication tools. In addition, we evaluate and compare team performance in terms of the deliverable quality. Our results indicate that both virtual and face-to-face teams bring relatively high initial trust to the team experience. More enduring trust, however, must be maintained by positive, task-oriented team dynamics. Team mates need to meet work expectations in order to maintain the trusting environment. We confirm that trust is important to team performance for both virtual and face-to-face teams. Higher trust teams do tend to perform better. We also found that both virtual and face-to-face teams spend similar proportions of time in each team formation stage. Finally, there is no significant difference in results produced by face-to-face and virtual teams, though in this study the direction of effectiveness leans towards the virtual teams. This is potentially good news since many believe that face-to-face groups produce better results than their virtual counterparts.