Virtual Team Adaptation: Management Perspective on Individual Differences

Abstract

In the contemporary business world, digital transformations have undergone vast and important developments over the last several decades, and they have aided in the development of the virtual team concept, in which geographically dispersed team members work to achieve a common goal. Virtual teams, according to the literature, suffer from process losses more frequently than their face-to-face counterparts. Although just a few studies have looked at the effects of individual differences in virtual teams, this study fills in the gaps by examining the impact of individual differences: age disparity (AD), gender disparity (GD), language competency (LC), and IT competency (ITC) from the management perspective on virtual team adaptation in the Sri Lankan private sector. A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 175 private sector companies in Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the data was analyzed using partial least squares path modeling (PLS) to test the study’s hypotheses. The results indicated that the hypotheses were statistically significant only in the language competency and IT competency and their effects were in the expected direction. Future research could benefit from the perceptions of employees in public sector organizations.