Social Capital and Knowledge Integration in Virtual Teams

Global competition and decentralization of decision-making coupled with the emergence of new communication and information technologies are leading more companies to use virtual teams. Unfortunately knowledge integration, the process of unifying information into a coherent structure, is often in­adequate within teams, which leads to poor team performance. To address this issue 42 teams who had a history and future were studied. Their level of social capital was measured prior to them performing two tasks in a controlled setting, one face-to-face and the other through a virtual synchronous environment. The results of this study made three contributions toward addressing this issue. First, the results suggested that all three dimensions of social capital directly impact knowledge integration within teams. Secondly, social capital was more important to the knowledge integration process when teams communicate primarily through computer mediated environments. Finally, the results of this study suggested that know­ledge integration fully mediates the relationship between social capital and team performance. The book is target toward both academic and practicioners who study and manage virtual teams.