Geographically dispersed teams often face challenges in coordination and collaboration, lowering their productivity. Understanding the relationship between team dispersion and productivity is critical for supporting such teams. Extensive prior research has studied these relations in lab settings or using qualitative measures. This paper extends prior work by contributing an empirical case study in a real-world organization, using quantitative measures. We studied 117 new research project teams within a company for 6 months. During this time, all teams shared one goal: submitting a research paper to a conference. We analyzed these teams' dispersion-related characteristics as well as team productivity. Interestingly, we found little statistical evidence that geographic and time differences relate to team productivity. However, organizational and functional distances are highly predictive of the productivity of the dispersed teams we studied. We discuss the open research questions these findings revealed and their implications for future research.

翻译：地理上分散的小组在协调和协作方面常常面临挑战,降低了他们的生产力。理解小组分散和生产力之间的关系对于支持这些小组至关重要。以前的广泛研究已经研究了实验室环境或使用定性措施的这些关系。本文扩展了先前的工作,利用量化措施,在现实世界组织中提供了经验性案例研究。我们研究了公司内部117个新的研究项目小组,为期6个月。在此期间,所有小组都有一个目标:向会议提交一份研究文件。我们分析了这些小组与分散有关的特性以及团队生产力。有趣的是,我们很少发现与小组生产率有关的地理和时间差异的统计证据。然而,组织和职能距离对我们所研究的分散小组的生产力具有高度预测力。我们讨论了这些研究结果揭示的公开研究问题及其对未来研究的影响。