Perceived Faultline in Virtual Teams: The Impact of Norms of Technology Use

As virtual teams are naturally distributed and diverse, they are susceptible to faultline, causing teams fracturing into subgroups. The current works examining perceived faultline have mostly concentrated on collocated teams. Examining these phenomena in virtual teams deserves more attention due to the greater possibility of members making an inaccurate impression from the limited cues available. To address this need, this research presents a novel study among 200 virtual team members from various industries. The empirical findings suggested that perceived faultline negatively impact team performance through task conflict. This negative effect of task conflict however can be attenuated by norms of technology use. This emphasize the need for cultivating or deliberate creation of norms of technology use among distributed team members in helping them coping with the negative effect resulted from faultline and conflict.