KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN VIRTUAL TEAMS: THE IMPACT ON TRUST, COLLABORATION, AND TEAM EFFECTIVENESS by

The practice of virtual teams has provided organizations with a convenient solution for gathering experts to collaborate online in order to accomplish organizational tasks. However, the dynamics and characteristics of virtual teams create challenges to effective collaboration. Collaboration is an important element in teamwork, team members need to collaborate to achieve the goal for which the team is established. Literature on virtual teams has been growing for over a decade with research investigated different aspects of virtual work. Trust among virtual team members has been investigated by information systems researchers as a crucial challenge for virtual teams. Knowledge sharing and management in virtual teams have been the focus of many research recently as they represent a challenge for virtual work environment; because the knowledge is scattered among geographically distributed team members with limited face to face interaction. Yet, trust and knowledge sharing are not the final outcome of teamwork, there is a gap in the literature on how trust and knowledge sharing affect collaboration and ultimately team effectiveness in virtual settings. This study extends the literature on virtual teams through investigating the relationship between knowledge sharing, trust, and collaboration among team members in virtual team settings; and how these constructs ultimately affect virtual team effectiveness. We argue that the characteristics and structure of virtual teams requires a distinctive understanding on how