“How do new venture teams build cohesion in a virtual setting”

Abstract: The covid-19 related health crisis has marked a revolution in the history of remote work. New venture teams (NVTs) are being forced or recommended to pursue their new venture remotely and digitally and are likely to encounter obstacles. Therefore, having to deal with remote and virtual teamwork is critical to understand the reasoning behind operating a new venture. This virtual teamwork partly depends on technological resources but mostly leans on effective team dynamics, where trust, acceptance, awareness and coherence play a crucial role. The focus is on researching cohesion as this factor appears to have a fundamental role in maintaining efficient teamwork. The benefits of cohesion on individuals and teams are ubiquitous and associated with successful performance and are therefore heavily researched. Nevertheless, how cohesion is being built in NVTs that have been forced to work in a virtual setting has not been researched yet. This study investigates how NVTs currently build cohesion in a virtual setting by following a qualitative research design. Furthermore, an iterative approach has been used that implements case studies to allow for an in-depth understanding of how processes unfold from the topic at hand. In line with the inductive approach, semi-structured interviews allowed for rich data that has been thematically analyzed via a hybrid approach and the use of NVivo. The results of this study display to what extent the researched NVTs exhibited cohesion or not, and the study provides key insights into how the NVTs build cohesion in a virtual setting. The NVTs use a wide variety of approaches that aid the task and social related cohesion performances, two subdimensions of cohesion. The study ends with accompanying research propositions are described that inform future research and the practice of building cohesion in virtual settings.