Structural Changes Associated with the Temporal Dispersion of Teams: Evidence from Open Source Software Projects

This study relies on Media Synchronicity Theory and Social Network Analysis to analyze how the structure of collaboration networks change when collaborating teams become temporally dispersed. The empirical test of hypotheses using ordinary least squares with archival data from 230 Open Source Software projects shows that the collaboration structure networks of more temporally dispersed teams are sparser and more centralized, and these associations are stronger in those teams exhibiting higher relative performance.