Role of the Process Model in Aligning Mental Models in Global Virtual Teams

57 202010 37 cussed as the main causes of misunderstandings and gaps among members of GVTs leading to a hindrance in performance (Klitmller & Lauring, 2013;Tenzer & Pudelko, 2016;Zakaria, 2016).These suggest that it is important for GVTs to have competency in the common language and understand the cultural backgrounds of other members.Others hint at the importance of GVTs to have in place a team mental model (TMM) that would enable them to work cohesively and collectively (Maynard & Gilson, 2014).Several studies on teams and management of product-development projects indicate a positive relationship between a shared TMM and team performance (Cooke, Kiekel, & Helm, 2001;Ellis, 2006;Espinosa, Slaughter, Kraut, & Herbsleb, 2007;Mohammed, Ferzandi, & Hamilton, 2010).Development of TMMs in GVTs, however, seems counterintuitive because of the geographic dispersion of team members.In addition, GVTs are typically formed in knowledge-based environments, where there is a high degree of autonomy.This means, antecedents and processes of TMM development that works in command-and-control teams (Klimoski & Mohammed, 1994) do not hold effective.In this concept paper, we review the extant literature of TMMs to identify antecedents and their applicability to GVTs, and highlight the limited applicability of the present antecedents of TMMs to GVT environments.We conjecture