A Tale of Two Teams: Success and Failure in Virtual Team Meetings

Interaction between two teams with the same team leader and with similar size and goals moved from weekly face-to-face meetings to virtual meetings because of the temporary displacement of the team leader to a time zone six hours ahead of the rest of the team. One team focused primarily on software development and the second team on developing and testing a research instrument. The Software Team floundered through multiple different meeting arrangements and eventually agreed to disperse until the leader returned to the same time zone. In contrast, the Research Instrument Team kept a single meeting time that was set before it moved to virtual gatherings, and continued to be an active and productive team. This paper explores what factors led to this divergence in team success and concludes that the implicit temporal structures entraining the members of the Software Team coupled with an inability to repair member unhappiness and an unequal dispersion of skill sets among virtual and co-located members led to one team’s eventual shutdown.