Cohesion and Performance in Virtual Teams: An Empirical Investigation

Work groups are of critical importance to organizational effectiveness. Whether group members can function together cohesively affects the performance of a team. Therefore, the relationship between group cohesion and performance has been the focus of many studies. With advances in information technology, virtual teams have been employed in firms for a variety of tasks. Compared to face-to-face teams, however, virtual teams exhibit different characteristics. How cohesiveness is related to performance in virtual teams then becomes an interesting research question. In this paper, we develop a model of the relationship between cohesion and performance based on a synthesis of the existing literature. We empirically investigate this relationship by studying 22 virtual groups over four months. Our results reveal that in virtual teams, cohesiveness tends to influence performance over time, while performance has a reciprocal impact on cohesion as well.