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To cite this article: Guido Hertel , Udo Konradt & Katrin Voss (2006) Competencies
for virtual teamwork: Developmentand validation of a web-based selection tool for
members of distributed teams, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,
15:4, 477-504, DOI: 10.1080/13594320600908187
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND
ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
2006, 15 (4), 477 – 504
Ó 2006 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
http://www.psypress.com/ejwop DOI: 10.1080/13594320600908187
478 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
more and more ‘‘virtual’’ due to the fact that members are often dispersed
across different locations and have to coordinate their work via electronic
communication media such as telephone, e-mail, video-conferencing, etc.
(Axtell, Fleck, & Turner, 2004; Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Hertel, Geister, &
Konradt, 2005). Virtual teams can be found in various fields, such as research
and development (R&D), procurement, or customer service, and they also
exist in noneconomic organizations such as virtual collaboratories in sciences
(e.g., Finholt, 2002). Although exact data of the prevalence of virtual teams in
organizations are difficult to obtain because the distinction between face-to-
face and virtual teams is rather gradual than dichotomous (cf. Bell &
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Kozlowski, 2002; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005), recent estimations as well
as future scenarios suggest that the number of such teams is substantial and
constantly growing. For instance, a recent survey among 376 business
managers from different branches in Germany (AFW, 2002) revealed that
about 20% of the managers worked predominantly as a member of a virtual
team, and about 40% worked at least temporarily in virtual teams. Similar
trends have been reported for other countries (Duarte & Snyder, 2001;
Gibson & Cohen, 2003; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). In light of these developments,
HR and management applications for virtual teams are urgently needed.
Empirical research on virtual teams has accumulated slowly in the last few
years, focusing predominantly on operational issues such as leadership or the
maintenance of trust and motivation (e.g., a special issue of Organizational
Dynamics in 2003 on leadership in virtual teams; see also, for recent reviews,
Gibson & Cohen, 2003; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005; Hinds & Kiesler,
2002). Issues of selection and placement of virtual team members, however,
have been neglected so far, somewhat parallel to the research history of conven-
tional teams some years ago (Stevens & Campion, 1999). Initial theoretical
suggestions have been made (e.g., Blackburn, Furst, & Rosen, 2003; Ellingson
& Wiethoff, 2002; Harvey, Novicevic, & Garrison, 2004), but we are not aware
of any study addressing the issue of staffing virtual teams empirically.
The objective of the present study is the development and empirical
validation of an Internet-based measure to assess crucial competencies for
virtual team members. We first outline the theoretical model on which the
instrument is based and then describe item development and a pilot study on
initial construct validation. Finally, we document a validation study with
existing virtual teams of a large media company in which we assessed the
concurrent predictive validity of our measure, and collected first evidence of
team-level aspects of staffing virtual teams.
conventional teams, a virtual team works across space, time, and organiza-
tional boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication
technologies’’ (p. 6). Although such early approaches seem to suggest that
virtual teams are qualitatively different from conventional teams, the
distinction between those two is rather fuzzy. Teams that are considered as
conventional also use electronic communication media, and members of
distributed teams often meet also face-to-face at least occasionally. As a
consequence, consensus is now increasing that the degree of virtuality is
rather a quantitative dimension of teams (relative ‘‘virtuality’’; cf. Axtell
et al., 2004; Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005;
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Figure 1. Predictors and criteria of the Virtual Team Competency Inventory (VTCI).
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 481
This is particularly true for high status and well trained experts that are
often the candidates for virtual teams.
The third group of competencies is taskwork-related KSAs that cover
general aspects of reliability of a person. Particularly, aspects of loyalty,
integrity, and conscientiousness are considered as relevant. These compe-
tencies have been proven as relevant for performance in general (e.g.,
Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) as well as for performance and motivation in
conventional teamwork (e.g., James & Cropanzano, 1994). Although
empirical evidence is lacking, we expect that these competencies should be
also relevant in teams with high levels of virtuality, particularly when
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external and/or social control are reduced (see also Ellingson & Wiethoff,
2002; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999).
The fourth group of competencies is teamwork KSAs that include coopera-
tiveness and communication skills. Cooperation and conflict management
skills are considered relevant because reduced personal interaction and
lack of common context might increase the risk of misunderstandings and
feelings of being neglected. The importance of communication skills, on
the other hand, is less obvious in virtual teams because face-to-face inter-
action is generally reduced. On the one hand, this might lead to an increase of
communication skills needed in order to develop innovative ways to maintain
interpersonal connections. Indeed, in a study of health circles among tele-
workers, participants stressed repeatedly that they had to be socially active
rather than passive in order to prevent isolation and exclusion (Konradt,
Schmook, Wilm, & Hertel, 2000). However, communication skills might
also become less relevant with higher levels of virtuality in teams due to a
general reduction of social interaction and a stronger task orientation (e.g.,
Marshall & Novick, 1995). The data of this study will shed initial light on this
question.
Finally, telecooperation KSAs as the fifth group contain competencies
that are particularly related to challenges of high virtuality in teams, such as
isolated working conditions (requiring self-management-skills), lack of
mutual control (requiring interpersonal trust), and cultural diversity
(requiring intercultural skills). Together, the five groups of competencies
are expected to predict the potential of persons for high performance in
virtual teams. Moreover, we also expect these competencies to predict the
potential for mobilizing high motivation as important part of performance
in virtual teams. Whether this potential can be realized might of course be
moderated by demands and external factors such as task design, leadership
style, organizational integration, etc. (cf. Figure 1). However, in this initial
study we focus on individual competencies only.
In the next section, we describe the development of the Virtual Team
Competency Inventory (VTCI) as a questionnaire measure of the latter three
competencies of our model: taskwork KSAs, teamwork KSAs, and
484 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
QUESTIONNAIRE DEVELOPMENT
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Item selection
Item selection was guided by the competency model described above and
followed common practice (e.g., Aguinis, Henle, & Ostroff, 2001; for details,
see Lehmann, 2003). An initial item pool was developed based on the
theoretical concepts of the 11 competencies. Items were either adopted based
on inspections of various German personality measures (e.g., Borkenau &
Ostendorf, 1993; Fahrenberg, Hampel, & Selg, 1994; Sonntag & Schäfer-
Rauser, 1993) or developed by the authors in cases where no appropriate
instruments were available. The initial item-pool contained 132 self-rating
items measuring the following dimensions:
All items were answered on 5-point scales ranging from ‘‘do not agree’’ (1) to
‘‘do agree’’ (5). Moreover, in the end of the pilot version, age and gender
were collected as demographic variables. One final item asked whether
the participants had answered the questions honestly on a 5-point answer
scale.
test. As could have been expected for an item pool that size, this initial
analysis did not show a meaningful factor structure. Following common
standards of item analysis, we reduced the number of items in a step-wise
procedure. Items were omitted that showed extreme endorsement rates
(lower than .20 or higher than .80), high crossloadings, or low intercorrela-
tions with other items addressing the same theoretical construct. Based on
this iterated revision procedure, 39 items were finally selected.
A principal component analysis of these 39 items to explore whether our
item selection was meaningful revealed 11 factors with Eigenvalues 41,
corresponding to a visible break point according to a Scree test. These 11
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factors explained 65.3% of variance (using the same sample as in the first
PCA might be in order in this initial phase of item selection). Factor
loadings of most of the items were highest on the dimensions expected
theoretically.1 The endorsement rates of the selected items varied between
.55 and .78, and the corrected item-total correlations mostly exceeded .35
with the exception of one item of the loyalty subscale (cf. Table 1).
Reliabilities (Cronbach’s alpha) of the 11 subscales were mostly satisfying
given the scale length of three or four items per subscale, again with the
exception of the loyalty subscale (cf. Table 1). The mean interitem
correlation was .25 for the loyalty subscale.
Intercorrelations between the 11 subscales were moderate and in line with
the theoretical model, revealing predominantly higher correlations between
subscales within each of the superordinate categories than across. Moreover,
no significant correlations occurred between the subscales and the age of the
participants, all rs5j.15j. Gender correlated significantly with six of the
subscales. Male compared to female participants showed somewhat higher
scores in learning motivation (Ms ¼ 3.94 vs. 3.45), t(167) ¼ 4.16, p5.001,
creativity (Ms ¼ 3.91 vs. 3.47), t(167) ¼ 4.09, p5.001, independence
(Ms ¼ 3.85 vs. 3.49), t(167) ¼ 3.35, p5.01, and persistence (Ms ¼ 3.74 vs.
3.49), t(167) ¼ 1.98, p ¼ .05, while revealing somewhat lower scores in
integrity (Ms ¼ 3.61 vs. 3.92), t(167) ¼ 2.31, p5.03, and interpersonal trust
(Ms ¼ 3.9 vs. 3.5), t(167) ¼ 2.58, p5.02. These gender differences are largely
consistent with other results in the literature (e.g., Costa, Terracciano, &
McCrae, 2001; Feingold, 1994).
DISCUSSION
Based on this pilot study with 169 student participants, an item pool of 132
items had been pretested as paper/pencil questionnaire. Following common
standards of item-analysis, a 39-item set was selected to measure the 11
constructs of our conceptual model. With only three or four items per
1
A table with these factor loadings is available on request from the first author.
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TABLE 1
Number of items, range of item endorsement rates, corrected item-total correlations, scale reliabilities (alpha), and intercorrelations of the
11 subscales (39 selected items) of the pilot study (N ¼ 169)
Item Corrected
endorsement item-total
Number rates correlations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Alpha coefficients of subscales are displayed in the main diagonal. **p 5 .01, *p 5 .05 (two-sided).
487
488 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
Main study
The objective of the main study was to validate the VTCI in a field context
with virtual team members using an Internet-based version of the measure.
Apart from exploration of internal validity of the measured competencies,
supervisor ratings of participants’ performance and motivation were
collected at the individual level to enable concurrent validation of the VTCI.
Thus, construct validation was guided by hypotheses on the factorial
validity, the criterion-related validity, and the validity of the complete test
battery. Moreover, we also collected supervisor ratings of effectiveness at the
team level as an initial step towards the exploration of different competency
aggregations.
Factorial validity
The underlying conceptual model of the VTCI (cf. Figure 1) consists of three
general groups of competencies (taskwork KSAs, teamwork KSAs, and
telecooperation KSAs) that are in turn operationalized by 11 subscales
resulting from our requirements analysis. Hence, although intercorrelations
are likely between subscales of the same general category, we expect that all
subscales are reflected in a confirmatory factor analysis of the resulting data.
Stated more formally:
Team-level analyses
In addition to the validation of the VTCI at the individual level, we also
collected effectiveness ratings at the team-level in order to explore different
compositions of the measured competencies. Several methods of team compo-
sition are possible. Consistent with earlier work on conventional teams
(Barrick et al., 1998), we specifically considered for each team (a) the mean
score of individual measures, (b) the lowest score (minimum), (c) the highest
score (maximum), and (d) the variability of the individual scores. Due to the
explorative character of this research, we only postulate general trends for all
VTCI competencies instead of specific hypotheses for each aspect.
Extrapolating Hypothesis 2 (all VTCI competencies are positively
correlated with team members’ motivation and performance) to the team
level, we can expect a similar positive correlation between the mean scores of
the competencies within teams and team effectiveness, assuming that the
different individual characteristics combine additively to a collective resource
pool:
H3: The average of individual VTCI subscales within the teams should be
positively correlated with team effectiveness ratings at the team level.
490 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
H4: The minimum (but not the maximum) of individual VTCI subscales
within the teams should be positively correlated with team effectiveness
ratings at the team level.
Finally, for the variance of the VTCI competencies within the teams we
expected generally a negative correlation with team effectiveness, assuming
that high heterogeneity of extrafunctional competencies (not technical
skills) is particularly difficult to handle under conditions of high virtuality
and should increase misunderstandings and conflicts. Thus, high hetero-
geneity of the measured VTCI competencies should be detrimental for
virtual teams:
METHOD
Participants
The participants of the main study were recruited from a large Internet
provider company where they worked voluntarily within virtual teams.
These teams were responsible for the maintenance and supervision of
Internet chat rooms. For each team, a team manager was responsible for the
coordination of the work. The following general criteria of virtual teams
(Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005) were fulfilled by the teams: (1) The team
members worked together on a common task and had to coordinate their
work, (2) the team members worked at different locations that were
dispersed all over Germany, and (3) the team members communicated
predominantly via electronic media to coordinate their work.
Two hundred and forty-two out of five hundred and forty-eight invited
team members completed an Internet-based version of the VTCI, yielding a
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 491
Measures
Predictors and control variables. The 11 competencies of the revised
version of the VTCI were used as predictors.3 Furthermore, the following
variables were measured as control variables: age, gender, time belonging to
the team, and honesty of answers.
Procedure
The procedure included an Internet-based questionnaire to be completed by
each team member, and standardized questionnaires for each member and
the whole team to be completed by the responsible team manager.
Participants were informed via e-mail about the purpose of the study and
that the data would be kept confidential. The Internet-based questionnaire
was entered with an individual password. Demographic data were collected
after completion of the VTCI items. The average completion time of the
questionnaire was 8.3 minutes (SD ¼ 3.9). In the team-level analyses, only
2
Sixteen participants with more than 50% missing data in one of the subscales have been
omitted. Other missing data have been replaced by the subscale mean.
3
For explorative reasons, additional self-assessment items were included in the
questionnaire that are not subject of this paper.
492 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
RESULTS
Confirmatory analysis
A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to test the fit of the
VTCI data to the underlying model. Of the original 11 subscales, only 10
were considered in the CFA because the subscale measuring intercultural
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TABLE 2
Model fit indices (maximum likelihood) for different models of the VTCI structure
(intercultural KSAs excluded)
**p5.001.
4
A more restrictive selection of teams would have reduced the sample size too much.
However, the ratio of missing data were relatively high in some teams so that the results of the
exploratory team-level analyses have to be taken with caution (cf. Timmerman, 2005).
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 493
5
The subscale intercultural skills is included here for explorative reasons. Alpha reliability
was .79 for those participants who had answered all four items of the subscale (N ¼ 93). In the
following correlation analyses, missing data of this subscale were estimated by the subscale mean.
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TABLE 3
494
Number of items, range of item endorsement rates, corrected item-total correlations, scale reliabilities (alpha) and intercorrelations of the
11 subscales of the VTCI and criteria variables in the main study (N ¼ 242)
12. Individual .30** .04 .12 .29** .05 7.02 .07 .12 .11 7.06 .17*
performance
(manager ratings)
13. Individual .31** .15* .16* .25** .11 .06 .08 .09 .07 .02 .21* .80**
motivation
(manager ratings)
**p 5 .01, *p .05 tested two-sided for intercorrelations of the 11 VTCI subscales, and tested one-sided for intercorrelations with performance and
motivation ratings (last two lines) based on Hypothesis 2. Missing data of single intercultural KSA items were estimated by the subscale mean. Due to
missing data of the managers’ ratings, the correlations between the first 10 VTCI subscales and managers’ performance/motivation ratings were based on
N ¼ 118, and the correlations between intercultural KSAs and managers’ performance/motivation ratings were based on N ¼ 101.
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 495
cooperativeness are in line with our expectations and similar to the reported
bivariate correlations with performance ratings.
Interestingly, the beta weight of loyalty, beta ¼ .40, even exceeds the
bivariate correlation score, r ¼ .30. At the same time, the conceptually
related subscale of integrity showed a significant correlation with loyalty,
r ¼ .61, but nearly zero correlation with the performance criteria, r ¼ .04.
Finally, the beta weight of integrity in the regression is significantly negative,
beta ¼ 7.30 (cf. Table 4). Together, this result pattern suggests a suppressor
TABLE 4
Results of the regression analysis on individuals’ motivation and performance based on
supervisor ratings
6
Reduced sample size because the team managers only rated those team members who they
felt they knew sufficiently.
496 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
Team-level analyses
Finally, we computed aggregation scores of the VTCI subscales at the
team level and correlated these scores with the supervisors’ overall team
effectiveness assessments that were based on the average of three
team effectiveness ratings (quality of work, initiative of the team, overall
7
More formally (Tzelgov & Henik, 1991), a suppressor effect exists when
ðrcp rcs rps Þ=ð1 rps 2 Þ rcp > 0
The correlation between the criterion (c) and the predictor (p) is denoted as rcp, the correlation
between the criterion (c) and the suppressor (s) is denoted as rcs, and the correlation between the
predictor (p) and the suppressor (s) is denoted as rps. For the given correlations between
performance rating as criterion, loyalty as predictor, and integrity as suppressor, this equation
equals .14, which is 4 0.
8
The general regression results were virtually the same when gender was entered as a first
step into the regression.
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 497
TABLE 5
Team-level correlations of different VTCI aggregations with team effectiveness ratings
by supervisors (N ¼ 22)
Loyalty .26
Integrity
Conscientiousness .28 .33{ 7.39*
Cooperativeness .30{ .47* 7.51**
Communication skills
Learning motivation .28
Creativity .38* .40* 7.29{
Independence .29{ 7.28
Persistence
Interpersonal trust
Intercultural KSAs
{
p 5 .10, *p 5 .05, **p 5 .01 (tested one-sided). Only correlation scores 4.25 are displayed
for reasons of clarity.
9
Multilevel analyses considering the team effectiveness ratings in addition to the ratings of
the individual members might have been also appropriate here. However, testing the baseline
model revealed that there is not sufficient variability in the means across groups to proceed with
the multilevel analysis.
498 HERTEL, KONRADT, VOSS
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an efficient measure
for the selection and placement of members in virtual teams. A conceptual
competency model was developed, distinguishing taskwork KSAs, team-
work KSAs, and telecooperation KSAs as three major groups of selection
criteria that were further subdivided into 11 competencies. In order to
measure these competencies, the Virtual Team Competency Inventory
(VTCI) was developed out of a larger item pool and pretested in a pilot
study with 169 student participants. The resulting 39-item measure of the
VTCI contained three to four items for each of the 11 subscales and could be
administered on the Internet. Requiring only about 10 minutes completion
time, the VTCI can be considered as efficient.
Consistent with Hypothesis 1, the data of the main validation study
showed satisfying construct validity of the measure. A confirmatory factor
analysis revealed the underlying measurement model for 10 of the 11
competencies. The intercultural KSAs subscale had to be excluded in the
CFA due to a high amount of missing data. However, this subscale showed
satisfying reliability for those participants who had completed all four items
of the subscale. Five of the other subscales showed also sufficient reliability
scores given the early stage of this research (Lance et al., 2006). The
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 499
remaining five subscales, most of them having only three items, showed
reliabilities between .60 and .70 and need to be improved in the future.
Finally, the overall reliability of the VTCI measure was satisfying, rtt ¼ .92.
In order to assess the predictive validity of the VTCI at the individual data
level, the single competencies and the overall VTCI composite were compared
with team managers’ ratings of the performance and motivation of the virtual
team members. Partly consistent with Hypothesis 2, most of the correlations
between individual competencies and team members’ performance were in the
expected positive direction, although only few of these correlations were
significant. However, when the assessed performance of the virtual team
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were minor at best, even though they were mostly in the expected direction.
However, these results should be interpreted carefully given the pioneering
character of this research and the limitations discussed below. Moreover,
consistent with Hypotheses 3, 4, and 5, initial correlations between some
telecooperation KSAs (particularly those related to self-management) and
team effectiveness were observed. Both average and minimum amounts of
these competencies correlated positively with virtual team effectiveness.
These results provide tentative evidence for the assumed importance of
telecooperation KSAs at least at the team level. The team effectiveness
ratings might be more valid than the ratings of individual team members
because the main focus of the team managers was on the team, and no
periodical assessments of the team members were applied because they
worked voluntarily. Finally, the negative team-level correlation be-
tween team effectiveness and heterogeneity scores of two of the telecoopera-
tion KSAs (creativity and independence), as well as heterogeneity of
cooperativeness and conscientiousness, illustrate that the distribution of
competencies within virtual teams can be important. Consistent with
Hypothesis 5, these results suggest that heterogeneity of extrafunctional
competencies might be rather detrimental for virtual teams.
Before closing, several noteworthy limitations of this study should be
pointed out, along with future research directions. First, although the
sample size of our study is higher than in many other empirical papers on
virtual teams (see, for reviews, Axtell et al., 2004; Hertel, Geister, &
Konradt, 2005), clearly more teams and more complete data sets would be
desirable. In particular, the relatively low number of available team data sets
restricted the power of the team-level analyses. Future research should
replicate the current findings with more virtual teams and varying forms of
virtual teamwork (see Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt,
2005, for taxonomies). In particular, replications with paid workers, as
compared to the voluntary workers in our study, are desirable.10
10
The complete VTCI will be provided by the first author for further replication and
validation studies on request.
COMPETENCIES FOR VIRTUAL TEAMWORK 501
Secondly, our initial study focused only on teams with relatively high
levels of virtuality. It would be interesting to investigate potential differences
in the competency profiles with varying degrees of virtuality. For instance,
the impact of the telecooperation KSAs is considered as positively related
with the degree of team virtuality (Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005). Thirdly, as
already mentioned, the accuracy of the criteria might be improved,
particularly for the individual-level measures. In the present study, the
team managers often had more information about the team than about each
individual member. Moreover, the managers had neither been trained nor
were used to applying individual assessments in the past due to the
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voluntary nature of the work. Future studies should collect more accurate
performance ratings at the individual level and perhaps include also peer
and self ratings. Also, satisfaction ratings of the team members along with
group-level data on cohesion, team climate, etc. would be interesting.
Finally, although the importance of some of the VTCI competencies has
been demonstrated, the importance of others—such as interpersonal trust—
could not be confirmed in this study. Of course, this might be due to
manifold reasons (lack of variance in the current sample, reliability
problems of the subscales, etc.) and should be further explored before a
competency is entirely dropped from the inventory. In the case of trust,
however, empirical evidence from other work suggests that its impact might
be overestimated for virtual cooperation (e.g., Aubert & Kelsey, 2003;
Hertel, Konradt, & Orlikowski, 2004; Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003).
This article documents the development and initial empirical validation
of an economic Internet-based measure for the selection of virtual team
members. Although the resulting measure can be further improved, the
current data on construct validity, concurrent validity, and economy of
application are promising. Together with our theoretical competency model,
we hope this research will initiate further research activities in this growing
field.
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