Group Maintenance in Technology-Supported Distributed Teams

Are geographically-distributed teams which exhibit high levels of group maintenance between members successful? We answer this through content analysis of emails from two Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) teams. Our results illustrate that the groups utilize low levels of organizational citizenship behaviors and high levels of positive politeness actions. INTRODUCTION Small groups or teams are a mechanism for organizations to integrate diverse forms of specialized knowledge (Grant, 1996). To allow individuals to serve on multiple teams unconstrained by geography, organizations are increasingly turning to information-technologysupported or virtual teams. Members of virtual teams may come from a variety of organizations or sub-organizations; rather than being assigned to the team by a common manager, and members often voluntarily choose to participate (a form that Stark (1999) described as a “heterarchy”). As a result, these teams are often self-organizing, that is, they are characterized as having a “high degree of decision-making and autonomy and behavioural control at the work group level... (such that) a much greater emphasis is placed on control from within rather than outside the group” (Manz and Sims, 1987). Other examples of self-organizing teams include ad hoc task groups that quickly form and dissolve, voluntary learning groups that may be informal or semi-formal (e.g., communities of practice, action learning groups or study circles), selfmanaging work groups within formal organizations, cross-organizational teams (e.g., in the context of inter-organizational alliances), and Internet-enabled collaborations such as Wikipedia and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. As organizations become