Collaboration in Global Distributed Teams: An Interdisciplinary Review

Abstract

This survey aims to characterize the interdisciplinary study of human collaboration in global distributed teams. Literature on this topic spreads over many research areas including computer-supported cooperative work, economics, management, organizational behavior, and software engineering, among others. The key insight of this review is to set forth a well-founded, unified taxonomy that categorizes the literature from different research domains. The taxonomy has two dimensions: primary research goals and ways of knowing. Using this taxonomy, we classified 199 recent journal papers (since 2005) in leading journals from 10 areas. In classifying the existing literature, we identified the opportunities and challenges to furthering the knowledge and application of research in global distributed teams. Stemming from the review, one of our proposals is to apply Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) to modeling human collaboration in global distributed teams and we demonstrate ways of applying EGT with specific examples. Three specific research directions are proposed in section 4. In addition to classifying journal papers, we also classified 74 papers since 2010 in leading conferences since conference papers are generally considered as formal publication in computer and information sciences. This supplement is presented as an appendix (see APPENDIX II).