McGill U. - Desautels Faculty of Management, Canada
Firms are increasingly relying on global teams with members dispersed across time zones to get knowledge work done. This paper investigates the effect of women in "temporal brokerage" positions—i.e., positions that bridge temporal subgroups with relatively few overlapping work hours— on the dynamics and performance of global knowledge production teams. Drawing on theories of gender and teamwork, we propose that teams perform better when women occupy positions of greater temporal brokerage, and that this effect is mediated by increased team member participation. Across two studies— comprising 84,071 global R&D teams (Study 1) and 4,767 randomly assigned global student teams (Study 2)— we find support for these predictions. Our theory and findings contribute to the growing literature examining knowledge production teams as “microstructures” of modern firms, and to the literature on MNCs.
