The Performance of Knowledge Collaboration in Virtual Teams: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Knowledge collaboration is an effective management method to promote the appreciations of intellectual capital and social capital. In a virtual team, team atmosphere, team network and the individual attributes, etc. shall affect the performance of knowledge collaboration (KC) in different degrees. The paper will build the theoretical framework that affects the performance of virtual team's knowledge collaboration, and use the Bootstrap-based structural equation model to perform empirical study on the theoretical framework. Empirical results show that network characteristics of virtual team, team attributes, individual attributes and collaborative efficiency all have significant impact on the performance of KC. Empirical conclusions will provide a theoretical basis and practical reference for promoting the performance of knowledge collaboration. With the rapid development and extensive application of information and communication technology, the virtual team collaborated across time, space and organizational boundary has become an important organizational structure for enterprises to cope with the increasingly accelerated market change. The virtual team, with advantages such as including diverse staff, broad organizational boundaries, flexible organizational structure and innovation resources allocation, etc., has been widely adopted in many fields including service outsourcing, IT and innovation research and development, etc. The previous research has shown that a virtual team is an effective model to settle the complex task on wide-scope and cross-disciplinary knowledge demand within the organization (1). Therefore, how to effectively improve the performance of virtual team has been a focused issue in the business and the academic circles. From the perspective of knowledge management, the virtual team is essentially the use of Heterogeneous subjects for collaborative knowledge innovation. In addition to compensate for the knowledge gaps to effectively solve the problem of knowledge scenario embedding and path dependence, the knowledge collaboration model also can obtain collaborative effects of multi-subject, multi-target and multi- tasks. However, because of staff diversity, and the use of electronic information technology as the primary means of communication, lacking of face to face communication, the knowledge collaboration and performance of a team is facing many problems. Therefore, in terms of the characteristics of virtual teams, it is necessary to study how to further enhance the collaborative efficiency of the virtual team and improve the performance of knowledge collaboration by integrating the collaborative innovation resources. On the basis of defining the performance of knowledge collaboration and collaborative efficiency, and taking Chinese service outsourcing enterprises team as research objects, this paper performs empirical analysis on the critical factors influencing the performance of the virtual team's