Understanding The Temporal Relationship Between Justice And Team Goal Commitment In Virtual Project Teams

Virtual project teams are spontaneous group configurations that endeavor to overcome spatial and temporal restrictions in bringing together distant experts to create just-in-time knowledge sharing coalitions. Due to their time-constrained nature and anonymity among members, we argue for team goal commitment as a more pertinent factor driving task performance. We then hypothesize that members’ perceived distributive, interactional, and procedural justice are viable antecedents leading to the inducement of team goal commitment among virtual project team members. Empirical findings from a longitudinal field experiment reveals that: (1) distributive justive has a positive and consistent effect on members’ team goal commitment across time; (2) interactional justice has a positive effect on members’ team goal commitment which increases over time, and; (3) procedural justive has differential effects on members’ team goal commitment across time depending on whether it deals with general working conditions or conflict resolution. Based on our analytical results, implications for both theory and practice are highlighted.