Business Commons^™

Being There Versus Being Wired: The Effect Of Colocation On Social Capital In Distributed Teams, Priscilla Arling, Mani Subramani

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Advancement in communication technologies continues to fuel the growth of geographically distributed teams. Managers and team members have expressed concerns about negative impacts when individuals work at a distance from each other since such changes in work structure can affect social interactions among individuals in teams. The social relationships, shared experiences, and ongoing interpersonal interactions that often arise from colocation are recognized as contributing to the social capital of individuals. In this paper, we examine how working in a distributed team, a feature that influences the extent to which team members are colocated, affects the level of individual social capital. …