Collaboration and Performance in Virtual Teams with Faultlines : An Emotional Management Intervention

Problem: Virtual teams with faultlines face challenges due to their dispersion, diversity, and virtuality, which can diminish their performance. To resolve this issue, team emotional management (TEM) interventions foster teams’ collaboration capability, that is, the team’s ability to build and manage relationships based on trust, commitment, and communication. Goals: This research aimed to analyse whether a TEM intervention can enhance team performance by improving the collaboration capability in virtual teams with faultlines. Method: Fifty-two four-member teams participated in an experiment with repeated measures (three measurement times). Teams were randomly assigned to either a TEM intervention or a control condition. Main results: The TEM intervention had a positive effect on trust and commitment, but not on communication. Moreover, trust and commitment fully mediated the effect of the TEM intervention on performance. Main implications: Our findings showed the relevance of a TEM intervention in improving the collaboration capability and performance in virtual teams with faultlines. This study contributes to research on faultlines, affect management in virtual teams, and computer-mediated communication.