Toward a General Model of Knowledge Creation in Virtual Teams

Virtual teams have made such an impact on organisations' knowledge management. As a result, the phenomenon of knowledge creation in virtual teams obviously deserves researchers' attention. Nonetheless, literature on virtual teams has not been much theory-grounded. Thus, to explore the influence of virtual teams on knowledge creation and fill the scarcity of theoretical foundation in the literature, this paper firstly proposes a theoretical model of knowledge creation process in virtual teams called Adaptive Social-Externalisation by primarily drawing from Nonaka's Organisational Knowledge Creation theory as well as Adaptive Structuration theory and Agency theory. Secondly, the characteristics of the process are also derived as Adaptiveness, Simultaneity, and Goal Congruency and Information Symmetry and can be used to determine the effectiveness of both knowledge creation and overall performance of a virtual team. Both theoretical and practical implications are then discussed.