Time Separation, Coordination, and Performance in Technical Teams

Technical teams are often distributed across geographic locations and across time zones. While spatial and time separation are often correlated, most prior studies have only focused on one or the other. As a consequence, their respective effects may be confounded when teams have both spatial and time separation. We argue that bridging spatial and time separation pose very different coordination challenges, thus their respective impacts need to be examined together to fully understand how geographic configuration influences team performance. We report on a field study of 123 technical teams conducted at a large semiconductor manufacturing company where we investigated how spatial and time separation influenced team performance. Our results show that time separation, in the form of maximum time zone difference spanned by members, has a stronger negative impact on team performance than spatial separation. We also show that this impact is indirect, i.e., large time zone spans create coordination problems, which in turn impact team performance. Put differently, when coordination problems are reduced, the negative association between maximum time zone span and performance disappears. We describe our findings and discuss implications for global team managers and collaboration tool designers.