An Empirical Study to Investigate the Impact of Factors Influencing Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Teams

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between virtual team performance and its critical explaining factors, i.e., individual, team, organizational, and technological factors, by exploring the mediating effect of knowledge sharing. For this purpose, a conceptual framework is proposed based on an in-depth Systematic Literature Review (SLR) analysis. Next, data is collected through a survey from 252 IT practitioners working in Pakistan’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Statistical tests on collected data are applied in statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) and smart partial least squares (SmartPLS) to evaluate the proposed conceptual framework empirically. Finally, 19 industrial and 5 academic experts verified the framework. There is a consensus among researchers and practitioners regarding the factors that contribute to the explanation of knowledge sharing and virtual team performance. Thus, the current study’s outcome may facilitate the management of software organizations to improvise their knowledge sharing infrastructure, make the development process more efficient, avoid project failure and increase the productivity of virtual teams.

Keywords

• Empirical study
• geographically dispersed teams
• knowledge sharing
• systematic literature review
• virtual teams
• virtual team performance