Researchers investigate consensus building in virtual teams during the Covid-19 pandemic

Virtual working offers many opportunities, but also harbors risks. In addition to the known disadvantages - less personal contact, communication and coordination difficulties - external crises can pose an additional challenge, especially if employees at different locations work together across local or national borders and are affected to varying degrees by a crisis. An international research team from the Universities of Göttingen, Bolzano and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has now investigated whether the members of virtual teams manage to find a consensus in their collaboration despite an external crisis. The study also examines the question of what this means for the performance of the team. The Covid-19 pandemic was used as an example of an external crisis. The results have been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Using the Multilevel Group-Process Framework, a statistical methodology for modeling behavioral changes over time, a data set of around 3,500 business administration students was examined, who were distributed across around 700 virtual teams to work on different consulting projects over several weeks. The results of the study show that the members of a virtual team can succeed in reaching a consensus on further collaboration despite the physical distance. -However, external crises can have a negative impact on consensus-building, explain Tobias Blay and Fabian Froese from the University of Göttingen. -Above all, the fear of becoming the victim of a crisis can make consensus-building more difficult.
The study shows that the fear of a health threat from the coronavirus has a negative impact on consensus-building in virtual teams. -Such a crisis can be brought directly into the team from outside the work context without the company or the team being able to do anything about it, the authors explain. It is therefore important for companies to recognize that even crises that supposedly have nothing to do with the company do not pass employees by without leaving a trace: "In such situations, managers in particular are called upon. Team-building measures such as virtual meetings can help to cushion the negative effects of the crisis and strengthen consensus.
This ability of virtual teams to reach consensus when working together also has an important impact on their performance. In particular, reaching consensus when coordinating tasks has a positive impact on the performance of the virtual team. -Virtual teams that pull together to accomplish tasks are more efficient-, according to Blay and Froese. -Even if team members don’t agree on everything, the virtual team should agree on how to coordinate the tasks at hand, which can lead to a competitive advantage over other virtual teams and improve the team’s performance.
Original publication: Tobias Blay et al. Convergence of collaborative behavior in virtual teams: The role of external crises and implications for performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 2023. https://doi. org/10.1037/apl0001133 .