Antecedents of Identity in Virtual Teams

The importance of virtual team (VT) identification for the success of theteam is widely recognized in literature. However, the antecedents of identifi-cation in virtual teams have remained understudied thus far. This study aimsat filling this gap by examining how identification with VTs is related to struc-tural factors such as the degree of virtuality, team size, cultural diversity andteam tenure, and to organizational justice. It is hypothesized that organiza-tional justice and team tenure are positively related to identification, whereasthe degree of virtuality, team size and cultural diversity have a negative rela-tionship with identification. These hypotheses were tested on a sample of 91virtual team members. The results revealed that, as predicted, organizationaljustice had a strong positive relation to virtual team identification. However,contrary to the expectations, the structural factors were not related to identi-fication. The results and their implications are discussed in terms of virtualteam literature.000