The Impact of Team Empowerment on Virtual Team Performance: The Moderating Role of Face-to-Face Interaction.

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between team empowerment and virtual team performance and the moderating role of the extent of face-to-face interaction using 35 sales and service virtual teams in a high-technology organization. Team empowerment was positively related to two independent assessments of virtual team performanceprocess improvement and customer satisfaction. Further, the number of face-to-face meetings moderated the relationship between team empowerment and process improvement: team empowerment was a stronger predictor for teams that met face-toface less, rather than more, frequently.Advances in communication and information technology have created new opportunities for organizations to build and manage virtual teams. Virtual teams are defined as groups of employees with unique skills, situated in distant locations, whose members must collaborate using technology across space and time to accomplish important organizational tasks (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000). While virtual teams play an important role in industry worldwide, most of the knowledge about them derives from practitioner articles (

How to empower employees: using training to enhance work units’ collective empowerment

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