| Virtual team represents an organizational form which can revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness. Since nineties, virtual teams have been subjected to an exhaustive research in multiple disciplines such as computer science, information systems, management science, and so on, but researchers agree that the results of previous research are inconsistent. Extant reviews providing holistic view of virtual team research do not provide conclusive or suggestive evidence explaining the inconsistency in research, and there is a need to develop a cogent theory explaining virtual team effectiveness. This thesis, based on an extensive review of literature and available research on virtual teams, identifies key drivers of virtual team effectiveness. It develops a conceptual, analytical, research framework with 9 propositions linking the identified drivers, to explain how virtual teams achieve success. The new framework is termed as EAST (extended adaptive structuration theory). It goes beyond the generalized frameworks, such as AST (Adaptive Structuration Theory) and Input-Process-Output framework to identify virtual team specific constructs such as Mission, Emergent Socio-Emotional States, and Individual Dimension. The results of the exploratory meta-analysis suggests that there are some important factors related to the organizations (which deploy virtual teams), individuals (members of virtual teams), and mission of virtual teams which are understudied in the extant research. Of the 9 propositions proposed by EAST, the exploratory meta-analysis found support for 7 propositions in the previous empirical studies on virtual teams. EAST identifies potential areas of future research for scholars, and provides advice to IS professionals regarding how to deploy virtual teams. |
