Understanding the Relationship between Justice and Team Goal Commitment in Virtual Project Teams: An Empirical Investigation

Virtual project teams are spontaneous group configurations that endeavor to overcome spatial and temporal restrictions in bringing together distant experts to create just-in-time knowledge sharing coalitions. Due to their time-constrained nature and the anonymity among members, we believe that team goal commitment might be a more pertinent factor driving task performance. We hypothesize that members´ perceived distributive, interactional, and procedural justice are viable antecedents leading to the inducement of team goal commitment among virtual project team members. A longitudinal field experiment was carried out to test these hypotheses. The results suggest that: (1) distributive justice is a consistently strong predictor of team goal commitment over time; (2) the effect of interactional justice on team goal commitment manifests over time, and; (3) procedural justice has no effect on team goal commitment over time. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.