An Extended Adaptive Structuration Theory Framework for Determinants of Virtual Team Success

Virtual team represents an organizational form which can revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness. Since nineties, virtual teams have been subjected to exhaustive research, mostly focused on the causal relationship between single or multiple constructs and the success variables of virtual teams, such as performance and satisfaction. There have been quite a few reviews on virtual teams which have provided a good overview of the state of virtual team research. These reviews have identified significant constructs in virtual team research, summarized and assessed their findings, proposed frameworks demonstrating the state of present research and posed some challenges and research questions which should be answered by future research on virtual teams. However, existing reviews are too general in terms of portraying relationships, such that their frameworks delineate links among categories of constructs as against among individual constructs themselves. None of the extant reviews identify explicit relationships among the most significant constructs of virtual teams and the research on virtual team performance is still equivocal. An understanding of such explicit relationships between the most significant constructs of virtual teams can get us a deeper insight into how virtual teams achieve effectiveness. Thus, there is a need to structure the current empirical research in order to understand the key direct and indirect drivers of virtual team performance. This study, based on a qualitative review of existing literature on virtual teams, identifies key drivers of virtual team effectiveness and develops a conceptual research framework with 9 propositions linking the identified drivers. It goes beyond the generalized models, such as, AST and Input-Process-Output models and develops a new model EAST (extended adaptive structuration theory) by extending the tenets of AST. This study uses adaptive structuration theory to organize the literature on virtual teams into three broad categories; viz. structural dimensions, social interaction and outcomes, and comes up with hypotheses and research questions linking the above categories.