The antecedents and performance consequences of virtual cooperation and leadership in global innovation teams

Global virtual teams (GVTs) are powerful and agile structures for organising work in a globalised digital world. They can be used to bring people together across an organisation’s global locations, who would not normally be able to collaborate and engage in joint action and decision making.

Potentially GVTs can tap into - and combine – dispersed resources to achieve innovation outcomes across functions, departments and locations. By doing so, they can potentially achieve greater creativity, innovativeness and organisational and project performance.
It is not surprising that the prevalence of GVTs has increased, as organisations seek to achieve cost efficiencies, greater flexibility and innovative solutions for complex projects. However, many questions exist on how to make GVTs work and there may be ‘costs’ or trade-offs involved resulting in the fact that some approaches and technologies may be more effective than others.

There are multiple complexities associated with physical, temporal and cultural distance in terms of resourcing, tools, processes and leadership and management of such teams. This project will develop new insights into key concepts of cooperation in a virtual environment and the drivers and outcomes of structures, processes and tools that affect GVTs. More importantly, the project will also focus on what types of leadership are most productive in a GVT context and what the contingencies are regarding the type of innovation targeted.

The research on global virtual teams builds theoretically on research on open innovation. Openness, however, is only one part of the puzzle in innovation and this projects goes beyond knowledge flows and studies cooperation in a context where global dispersion has potential advantages. From an innovation management perspective there are key questions that relate to whether temporal, physical, and temporal gaps can be managed adequate so that the potential benefits of dispersion can be obtained.

We are offering PhD supervision for a candidate to tackle the important question in the global innovation arena: ‘How can global virtual teams achieve their maximum potential to unleash creative and innovative performance?

Proposed Postgraduate Research Programme
• School: Graduate School of Business and Law
• Program name: PhD (Business)
• Program Code: DR205
• Enabling Capability Platform (ECP) Alignment : Global Business Innovation