Dynamic Boundaries in Virtual Student Teams: Is Participant Alignment the New Team Cohesion?
通过跨大学课程中的11个虚拟学生团队案例研究，发现动态边界（如分散、子团队形成）削弱了团队凝聚力，催生了“参与者对齐”这一新概念，对管理教育和团队实践有启示。
Distance education is becoming a global phenomenon affecting student teamwork, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, research in management education on changes in team cohesion in student teams remains limited, and even less is known in the context of dynamic forms of modern virtual team collaboration. We address this gap by exploring how dynamic boundaries affect team cohesion via a study conducted across two editions (spring 2018 and spring 2019) of a cross-university course. Results from the qualitative triangulated data collected from a multiple holistic case study composed of 11 virtual student teams (n = 65 participants) suggest that in the virtual student teams, dynamic boundaries (such as dispersion, subteam formation, boundary spanning, multiteaming, and moving on and off the team) diminish team cohesion in favor of “participant alignment” and have differential relationships with this novel concept. Our results contribute to the literature on management education and team dynamics and can be applied in academic and management practice by shifting the focus away from team cohesion and toward participant alignment as a new individual-level, multidimensional concept. This has the potential to become an important aspect of successful virtual teams operating under modern dynamic conditions.