A model for evaluating affective relationships in distributed work

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), like groupware systems, intranet or videoconference, enable team members to work on the same project but from different places. Some teams are called virtual because they exist only through the network. As the work is geographically distributed, bonds and relationships between people become more important. Indeed, the lack of faceto-face communication and common settings can alter the relationships between people and, as a result alter their cohesiveness and performance. The scope of this article is to propose a model that could investigate the presence of emotions and assess their role in distributed teams’ performance. We combine a model of cohesiveness with the Emotional Intelligence Theory to create our framework. We also study the emotions expressed by individuals and the possible communication of these emotions within their team. Eight hypotheses, which have not yet been tested empirically, are presented.