The relationship between team goal-setting and perceived virtual team effectiveness: The mediating role of cohesion

Virtual teaming is unquestionably being rampant in today's organizations and in management science. With this proliferation, it has become essential to deliver a conception of the major drivers of team effectiveness. This study ponders upon the impact team goal setting (TGS) generates on perceived virtual team effectiveness (VTE) in Turkish and American organizations and seeks to uncover the role of team cohesion (TC) as a mediator in the association between TGS and VTE. The results highlight the function of TGS in boosting VTE and confirm that TGS is important for the execution and success of virtual teams within organizations in both countries and provide preliminary evidence that TC partially mediates the relation between TGS and VTE. TC explained the majority of variance on VTE in Turkey, whereas TGS explained the majority of variance on VTE in USA. This clarifies that there occurs prominence on mutual team practices in collectivistic cultures and suggests the effect of national culture on higher cohesiveness as experienced by virtual teaming in Turkey. A significant difference was detected between the self-efficacy (SE) perceptions of team members in Turkey and USA. The distinctions of describing success standards and aspirations between these two countries are likely to affect the higher SE results of US team members compared to Turkish members. The present study is able to demonstrate that management processes containing high quality goal setting, which work with traditional teams, also influence the outcomes of virtual teaming and contributes to the position of TC in virtual research. Since virtual teams are not able to trust on social cues and have less rich communication among team members, it will be necessary to exploit TGS as a significant practice as it can aid in developing TC which will ultimately give rise to performance.