Building Relationships within Distributed Teams through Knowledge Management System and Processes

An important business factor for large corporations is continuity within a company's workforce. As world class organizations execute their business models through acquisitions and mergers, the work force continues to broaden beyond city, state, and country boarders. This increased distance has also increased the synergy issues and reduced team effectiveness that management and distributive teams have encountered. Team processes are more complicated because of the lack of day to day interaction while team performance may take longer because of reduced levels of personal communication. Team satisfaction may be worse due to the separation of team members as well as team effectiveness may be lower due to absence of team synergies. Knowledge management (KM) systems need to use the many different KM tools, and different implementation processes to capture the knowledge that can build these distributive relationships. The approach of this research is through a thorough search of the literature that will help to understand the problem with distributed teams. The results are the development of a solution and model framework to address the issue. The main findings include that the correct knowledge management tools and implementation approaches need to be selected to optimize relationship building and collaboration for distributed teams. The implication of this study on the industry begins the process of collecting information that can be utilized on distributed teams in knowledge management system environments.