Research regarding geographically dispersed teams (GDTs) is increasingly common and hasyielded many insights into how spatio-temporal and socio-demographic factors affect GDT functioningand performance. Largely missing, however, is research on the effects of the basic geographicconfiguration of GDTs. In this study, we explore the impact of GDT configuration (i.e., the relativenumber of team members at different sites, independent of the characteristics of those members or thespatial and temporal distances among them) on GDT dynamics. In a quasi-experimental setting, weexamine the effects of configuration using a sample of 62 six-person teams in four different one- and twositeconfigurations. As predicted, we find that configuration significantly affects team dynamics –independent of spatio-temporal distance and socio-demographic factors. More specifically, we find thatteams with geographically-based subgroups (defined as two or more members per site) have significantlyless shared team identity, less effective transactive memory, more conflict, and more coordination issues.Furthermore, in teams with subgroups, imbalance (i.e., the uneven distribution of members across sites)exacerbates these effects; subgroups with a numerical minority of team members report significantlypoorer scores on the same four outcomes. In contrast, teams with geographically isolated members (i.e.,members who have no teammates at their site) outperform both balanced and imbalanced configurations.
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