Individual Reactions to Failure in Virtual Teams

Abstract

This project examines the relationship between team identification and collaboration configuration and how they affect attributions to failure. In a sample of 110 participants, we examined reactions to failure. We manipulated perceptions of similarity among participants and a confederate of the study, we also manipulated collaboration configuration. We found that the collaboration configuration manipulation effected attributions; attributions about teammate failure in the collocated condition were more situational than attributions in the distributed condition, which were more dispositional. This finding supports the notion that collaboration configuration is important for understanding reactions to teammate failure.