Distributed Task Analysis And Integrated Competence In Vrtual Teams

The development of IT has made it possible that people from different places, time zones, or organizations, work and cooperate with each other as a virtual team. Virtual team management has become a crucial focus in international team studies. The present thesis focused upon the distributed task analysis and competence in virtual teams. We propose that task characteristics such as task structure, task difficulty, task oriented goal, task dependence, task cross-function, and task's dependence on internet, changes with different developmental phases of virtual team, accordingly, competence be determined by task characteristics . Thus we also hypothesized that competence of team members influenced individual performance and team performance . There are two stages in this study. At the first stage, an interview study was conducted to analyze the developmental pattern of virtual teams, differences between virtual team and face-to-face team, task characteristics, and competence structure. Distributed task analysis was used in examining a virtual team work as a case study. In the second stage, 38 virtual teams and 37 face-to-face teams with 340 team members were asked to complete a team work questionnaire. The result indicated that:(1)There are four phrases through the lifecycle of virtual team: forming stage, harmonizing stage, standardizing stage, and dismissing stage. (2)Task characteristics can be described with task structure, task difficulty, task oriented goal, task dependence, task cross-function, and task's dependence on internet. (3) The competence structure involves learning and innovation skill, communication skill, coordination skill, technical knowledge, self-management skill, and information disposal skill. (4)With the different phases of virtual team development, task characteristics changes dynamicly. (5) The competence of team members has a close relationship with individual performance: the self-management skill, technical skill, communication skill, learning and innovation skill have a large impact on individual task performance, while communication skill, coordination skill and information disposal skill aresignificantly correlated to individual contextual performance. (6) The competence of team members also has a close relationship with team performance: the learning and innovation skill, technology skill, communication skill and self-management skill affected team task performance, while communication skill, coordination skill, learning and innovation skill influenced team contextual performance.(7)Team climates also influnce team performance: innovation orientation, goal commitment, communication and participation, trust affected team task performance, while trust, communication and participation, innovation orientation influenced team contextual performance. (8) Virtual team is significantly different from face-to-face team in task cross-ftmnction, task dependence on internet and task oriented goals. (9) Virtual team members behaved significantly different from face-to-face team members in communication skill and self-management skill. (10) Virtual team is slightly different from face-to-face team in trust...