What is Social Distance

The chapter highlights the social distance, i.e. lack of emotional connection, formed among individuals working remotely in a geographically distributed team. The virtuality and cultural diversity of such teams creates limited opportunities for dispersed members to build social ties with remote team members leading to formation of ‘us' versus ‘them' attitudes which corrode team effectiveness. Based on a survey of 482 Indian IT professionals working in distributed teams, we find that social distance negatively impacts team effectiveness. Further, the results of the study show that practices such as task interdependence, inclusive communication, contextual information and shared identity can moderate the negative relationship between social distance and team effectiveness at varying levels of perceived status equality among individuals working in geographically distributed teams. The chapter provides recommendations for the effective management of geographically distributed teams whereby managers act as a bridge between the team members to overcome social distance.