Diversity, Internal Environment, Shared Leadership, and Information Sharing in Short-Duration Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment

摘要

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships among diversity, internal environment, shared leadership, and information sharing of short-duration virtual teams engaged in a problem solving task. A laboratory experiment was conducted involving collaboration technology supported virtual teams that were engaged in a task on conceptual data model design. Two forms of team diversity were measured e.g. national cultural and education specialization diversities. We found that educational specialization diversity adversely affected internal environment which in its turn, had a positive relationship with shared leadership in the teams. We also found that shared leadership was positively related to information sharing in the virtual teams.