Productive engagement in virtual teams: How team relational climates shape virtual team performance over time

One of the challenges in virtual teams is the struggle to build and maintain effective interpersonal relationships in the context of communication constraints and physical separation. Addressing this challenge, this study examines the influence of four team relational climates – communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing – on the virtual team performance growth over time. While theory and empirical evidence suggest that relational climates influence outcomes at the organizational level and individual prosocial behaviors, there is a lack of research on how relational climates at the team level affect team performance. Based on longitudinal multilevel analyses of a six-country sample of 291 virtual teams engaged in an online strategy game, we find that communal sharing and authority ranking team relational climates positively influence team performance growth over time. We advance the literature by investigating how team relational climates differentially affect virtual team performance over time. Our findings suggest that organizations should consider designing virtual team tasks, cultures, and authority structures to support the emergence of communal sharing and authority ranking team relational climates.