Is one plus one really greater than two? A qualitative study on how virtual work has impacted teamwork in management consulting

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has largely affected businesses around the world, and as a result, employees have worked from dispersed locations and used computer-mediated communication to a high extent over the last two years. The virtual shift has implications for industries that highly depend on their workforce to collaborate, industries such as Professional Service Firms (PSFs). One type of PSF that has gained relatively little attention in research and that relies heavily on teamwork, is that of management consultancies. Considering the research gap, and the rapid reconfiguration of teamwork that the pandemic has imposed, this is an important question to study - both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Through a qualitative multiple case study, we explore how virtual work has impacted teamwork in management consulting. We apply a theoretical lens inspired by Salas et al (2015a) that has summarized nine critical considerations for teamwork, and extend with literature on team cohesion and psychological safety. Our findings imply that teamwork in management consulting has mostly been negatively influenced by virtual work, and we summarize our key findings in two categories, impaired team synergies and decreased motivation. With impaired team synergies, we suggest that it has become more difficult to obtain collective intelligence and effective communication virtually. This is mainly due to more individual and siloed work within the teams. As for decreased motivation, we show that the notion of team spirit and belongingness to a team has worsened in the virtual context. These aspects, together with a weaker culture, contribute to a decreased motivation among consultants in the virtual context. With our findings, we contribute with extensions to both the PSF and management consulting literature as well as to the teamwork literature. Finally, we contribute with a conceptual model of virtual work's impact on teamwork in management consulting.