The Role ofSocial Capital and Shared Mental Model inVirtualR&D Teams

The working style of virtual R&D team is becoming more and more popular, so lots of researchers concern about the performance of virtual R&D teams. Shared mental model (SMM) is a concept in psychology which is defined as a common thinking style developed by similar experience and individual mental models. In this paper, we consider two types of SMM, which are task-related SMM and member-related SMM, and hope to investigatewhether SMM could influence the performance of R&D virtual teams and the antecedent relationship of SMM using social capital theory. The research results indicate that we could use social capital theory to explain the antecedents of task-related SMM and member-related SMM.Wealso find that task-related SMM and member-related SMM are both positively related to virtual R&Dteam performance. This researchemphasizes the importance of the notice on SMM in virtual team establishment, which should be paid more attentions.