Virtual team
Technology and common ground

When team members are highly dispersed, members are embedded in different external contexts and thus have less shared contextual knowledge, leading participants to take for granted common knowledge. Sole and Edmondson (2002) call this "situated knowledge," finding evidence that the majority of conceptual misunderstandings resulted from lack of awareness of or failure to appropriate such knowledge. Such lack of mutual knowledge of each other’s situations increases coordination problems in acquiring knowledge and resources. Transactive memory is difficult to establish in virtual teams as it is often not transferred to new members, contextual knowledge is not kept or well-documented, and communication is indirect or infrequent. Development of this type of common ground is particularly difficult in virtual teams which are structurally dynamic or experience high turnover, as teams with a short history together tend to lack effective patterns of information sharing and working together, limiting the amount and variety of information that can be communicated across team members.
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