Expertise, extraversion and group interaction styles as performance indicators in virtual teams

Abstract

This study investigates how a personality trait and expertise affect virtual teams interaction, and how that interaction leads to different levels of performance (e.g., solution quality, solution acceptance, cohesion). Teams have been shown to exhibit constructive, aggressive/defensive, or passive/defensive interaction styles that affect communication and thus team performance by facilitating or hindering the exchange of information among group members. These styles reflect an aggregation of the behaviors exhibited by individual team members, which are rooted in their individual personalities. The effects of interaction style on team performance have been well established in face-to-face and virtual teams. Generally, constructive interaction styles produce positive outcomes whereas passive/defensive styles beget negative ones. Aggressive/defensive teams produce solutions that are correlated with the expertise of those that have wrested control of the group but there is often little support for those solutions. The current work explores how different constellations of extraversion and expertise manifest themselves into group interaction styles and, ultimately, outcomes. The study involves 248 professional managers from executive MBA and professional development programs in 63 virtual teams that performed an intellective task. Results show that expertise and extraversion to be curvilinearly related to group interactions and performance, and high levels of extraversion and higher variations in extraversion between team members lead to less constructive and more passive/defensive interaction styles within teams. Results show that although expertise is the best predictor of task performance, it is primarily group interaction styles that predict contextual outcomes (e.g., solution acceptance, cohesion, effectiveness) in virtual teams.