You've heard the knock on virtual teams. "Our team will communicate better when we are all together." Obvious, right?
Not so fast. It turns out that a small team communicates best when one - and only one - member is situated at a distance. At least that's the conclusion of a paper entitled: "Subgroups, Imbalance and Isolates in Geographically Dispersed Teams," in a 2008 article in Organization Science.
Michael Boyer O’Leary, of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and Mark Mortensen, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management studied 62 six-member teams split between locations in the US and Canada. Configurations of the teams included all 6 at one location, 5 at one location and 1 at the other, 4 at one location and 2 at the other, and 3 at each location.
Contrary to conventional wisdom the configuration with one isolated member and five members at the other location performed better even than the completely co-located team. Apparently the isolated member provides a focus for the other members of the team to schedule and coordinate communications. The authors speculate that a 'novelty effect' could be in play or that "one person wouldn’t be a threat to the rest of the team."
The worst configuration was that with two members separated from the other four. The two bonded with each other but not with the rest of the team.
MIT Sloan Management Review.
PS. As an independent consultant who frequently operates as an isolated individual in a distant team I found this study particularly encouraging.
