Does Charter Quality Make a Difference to Global Virtual Team Performance?

Abstract

The following is still in the initial development stage, but we have already found a number of interesting findings that we wish to share with the AOM community. For example, contrary to prior claims, our preliminary results suggest that a team charter, in and of itself, does not result in higher quality outcome performance of global virtual teams. However, when considering the quality of the team charters and comparing the top and bottom quartiles of charter quality, differences in GVT outcome performance were marginally significant (at p=0.051). Teams that reported increasing process conflicts (but not task or relationship conflicts) also reported conflicts to the project’s administration and also referred to their charters. On the other hand, when teammates had greater respect for each other, they reported more conflicts to the administration. This suggests that informal processes may be most important than formal deliverables such as team charters, at least in terms of effectuating GVT outcome performance.