Exploring the Association between Temporal Dispersion and Virtual Team Performance

A relatively new research stream inquires into phenomena related to temporal separation, or temporal dispersion (TD) in distributed virtual teams. There is little empirical work to date on the association of TD with different indicators of team performance. This paper explores the relation between TD, product quality and product development speed, using open source software development teams as research framework. TD is defined and operationalized into two dimensions: coverage and overlap, and an exploratory regression model is tested on data collected from multiple archival sources comprising 100 open source software development distributed project teams. Results show that TD has a negative association with software interrelease time and that TD interacts with product complexity in its association with product quality.