Following the Sun: Exploring Productivity in Temporally Dispersed Teams

Dispersion in working teams has been addressed by earlier research mostly in terms of the physical distance that separated team members. In more recent work, however, the focus has been shifting towards understanding the influence of a newer construct: that of temporal dispersion (TD). The study of TD is so far constrained mostly to conceptual work, and the study of its association with distributed team performance is lacking. This paper attempts to explore that void by empirically investigating how TD relates to the team's productivity. Suitable hypotheses are developed based on coordination theory, and the analyses are performed on data collected from multiple archival sources comprising 100 open source software development distributed teams. The test of hypotheses is carried out using objective, non perceptual measures. Regression analysis is used to detect significant associations. Results show that temporal coverage is positively associated with productivity, and that the project's complexity moderates the relation between productivity and TD.