Supporting virtual team-building with a GSS: an empirical investigation

摘要

As virtual teams become more and more common in organizations, supporting virtual teams will be an important research topic for group support systems (GSS) scholars. This research examines how a GSS may be used to support virtual team-building. The results reveal that a GSS with an embedded goal-setting structure helped virtual teams to foster better team cohesion, better team commitment, and better collaboration climate than a GSS without the goal-setting structure. Virtual teams using a GSS with an embedded goal-setting structure also had better perceived decision quality and generated more decision alternatives than virtual teams using a GSS without the goal-setting structure. Implications of these findings are discussed.