Developing and Validating a Socio-Technical Model for Geographically Distributed Collaboration in Global Virtual Teams

As technological developments continue to enable broader adoption of geographically-distributed collaboration practices in academic, industrial, governmental and non-profit organizations around the world, it has become critical for scholars and practitioners to be able to assess and predict the effectiveness of virtual organizations (VOs) and the global virtual teams (GVTs) that comprise them. This study provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the social and technical factors thought to influence VOs and GVTs, and proposes an integrative ten-factor sociotechnical model for their study and implementation. We then use computer-assisted content analysis to validate the model on a large sample of interdisciplinary literature. Finally, we provide recommendations for further empirical testing of the model on existing virtual organizations. From this work, we hope to encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the social and technical factors affecting VOs.