Do Virtual and the Face-to-face Ways of Working Have an Impact on the Effectiveness of Teams? An Empirical Study in the Context of Multicultural IT Teams

This paper pursued to identify whether there are differences between virtual and face-to-face teams concerning their ability to develop a natural and incremental chain of linkages between individual, team and organization level effectiveness, in the context of interactions between their multicultural members and of interdependence that teamwork entails. The novelty and relevance of the research consist in empirically testing the above chain, along with the differences and similarities between virtual and co-located teams, on a sample of 159 respondents working in multicultural IT project teams from Romania and the Czech Republic. Structural equation modelling based empirical findings show statistically insignificant differences regarding the construction of the chain of effectiveness between virtual and co-located multicultural teams. Complementary, in terms of average values for all three levels of results, the face-to-face multicultural teams are superior to virtual multicultural ones, limited by the exclusion of team reaction time and lifespan from the research model.