Bridging the Social Chasm in Geographically Distributed R&D Teams: The Moderating Effects of Relational Strength and Status Asymmetry on the Novelty of Team Innovation

The access to the diverse information that teams gain through the geographic dispersion of their members is argued to increase the likelihood that they will produce more novel innovations. Although valuable, such dispersion also increases communication and coordination costs, making it difficult to utilize this information in developing new knowledge. To resolve this theoretical dilemma, we investigate the conditions that alter the effect of team members’ geographic dispersion on innovative novelty. Based on an investigation of 7,162 scientific teams in the biotechnology sector between 1973 and 1999, we argue and demonstrate that the degree of teams’ innovative novelty is curvilinear: it increases and then decreases as the geographic dispersion of the team members increases. We also establish that the effect of geographic dispersion on the novelty of a team’s innovation depends on the team’s social environment. The greater the relational strength among research and development team members, the stronger the initial positive effect of their geographic dispersion, and the weaker the negative effect at higher levels of dispersion. Furthermore, the greater the status asymmetry in a team, the weaker the initial positive effect of geographic dispersion, and the stronger the negative effect at high levels of dispersion. These results offer insights into the social mechanisms that can facilitate the realization of the potential embedded in dispersed teams to generate novel innovation.