Improving Virtual Team Collaboration Paradox Management: A Field Experiment

Virtual teams are ubiquitous in the workplace, yet they experience frequent collaboration challenges. Successfully managing the team collaboration paradox, in terms of maintaining a unified team perspective and diverse individual perspectives, presents a potentially important lever to improve virtual team performance. However, scholars have conflicting opinions regarding whether such improvement is possible. We argue that team collaboration paradox management will positively relate to team performance over time and can be improved via a theory-based intervention. This intervention draws from theory on paradoxes for its content (paradoxical thinking) and team development interventions for its structure (general content knowledge, team-specific feedback, action-focused planning). Given the complexity of paradoxes, it is unclear whether a single training session could substantively improve their management; therefore, one intervention condition was comprised of a single training session and the other condition included a follow-up session. Analyzing two waves of multisource quantitative data from a sample of 76 virtual teams from 37 organizations, we find a positive relationship between team collaboration paradox management and team performance at both time periods. We also find that only the intervention condition with the follow-up session, as compared with untreated control teams, significantly improved how well teams managed the collaboration paradox and thereby facilitated subsequent changes in team performance. Supplementary qualitative insights from the intervention sessions illuminate the actions virtual teams took to improve their collaboration paradox management. These results have important implications for the paradox and teams literatures, as well as the managers and members of virtual teams.