The Impact of Social Capital and Leadership on Performance in Distributed, Cross-National, Collaborative Learning Teams

A range of socio-technical factors influence performance in distributed teams. Trust and “social capital” are seen as amongst the most important of these factors. However, many studies have not taken into consideration sufficiently the impact of crossnational cultural factors on the development of trust and social capital in distributed teams . In this thirteen-week, quasi-experimental field study, we used a suite of web-based collaboration tools as the platform for a highly-interactive globally distributed collaborative learning environment. Within this learning environment, we investigated the impact of group mode (FTF vs. Distributed), faculty mode (FTF vs. Distributed), and geographic location (United States vs. South Africa) on group effectiveness, learning and development when performing unstructured tasks. In this initial analysis of the data, we found that students working in FTF teams had higher levels of satisfaction with the seminar and more trust in their teammates. However, they did not perform significantly better on a series of unstructured tasks than those in distributed teams.