Managing creative team performance in virtual environments: an empirical study in 44 R&D teams

Creative performance in R&D is of vital importance to organizations. Because R&D usually is organized in teams, the management of creative performance inherently refers to the team level creative performance. Over the last decades, R&D teams have become increasingly virtual. In this article we argued that the level of a team's 'virtuality' can be described by three factors: the proximity of team members, the communication modes used, and the manner in which the team task is coordinated. An exploratory empirical study in 44 R&D teams reveals that the creative performance is affected by each of these factors. The results of the study indicate that the more variable R&D teams are in the manner in which they employ these three factors, the higher is their creative performance. Virtuality of R&D teams is neither generally positive or negative for their creative performance: the creative outcome is a function of how virtuality in these teams is managed. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.