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Abstract We meta‐analytically assess the virtuality‐team effectiveness relationship using 73 samples of organizational teams (5738 teams) reporting on a wide range of productive (e.g. earnings), performance (e.g. customer ratings), social (e.g. cohesion), and team member (e.g. project satisfaction) outcomes. Our results suggest that in work organizations, virtuality is not a direct input—negative or positive—to team effectiveness. In contrast, using 109 samples of non‐organizational teams (5620 teams), we show that virtuality is a significant negative input to team effectiveness. We also meta‐analytically assess the issue of results generalizability from non‐organizational to organizational settings, and find that overall, results from non‐organizational studies largely fail to generalize to organizational virtual teams. Using moderator analysis, we explore a number of study features that may explain the poor results generalizability from non‐organizational to organizational studies. We find that results from non‐organizational studies using undergraduate students, short team duration, and laboratory settings drive the non‐generalizability effect, whereas results from non‐organizational studies using graduate students, longer team duration, and classroom settings produce results comparable to those of organizational studies of virtual teams. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.
Purvanova et al. (Wed,) studied this question.