Organizations have increasingly relied on virtual teams (VTs). For VTs to succeed, the collaborative behavior of team members plays an important role. Drawing from the open systems theory and using a phenomenon-driven approach, we investigate the dynamic pattern of collaborative behavior convergence among members of VTs (i.e., the emergence of collaborative behavior consensus) and its relationship with VT performance. Moreover, we investigate the differential influence of external crises, exemplified by key dynamic facets of the COVID-19 crisis (i.e., COVID-19 health threat and social distance). We used a multilevel approach (i.e., time, individual, and team levels) with the multilevel group-process framework to test our hypotheses. Results from a survey of 3,506 participants nested in 703 teams suggest that collaborative behaviors of VT members tend to converge over time, leading to the emergence of collaborative behavior consensus. Furthermore, a dynamic COVID-19 health threat leads to lower collaborative behavior consensus over time. Moreover, our results show that collaborative behavior consensus is partially positively related to VT performance and is particularly important for VTs with a lower level of collaborative behavior at the end of the collaboration. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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虚拟团队中协作行为的融合：外部危机的作用及其对绩效的影响。

组织越来越依赖虚拟团队 (VT)。对于 VT 的成功，团队成员的协作行为起着重要作用。我们借鉴开放系统理论并采用现象驱动的方法，研究了 VT 成员之间协作行为收敛的动态模式（即协作行为共识的出现）及其与 VT 绩效的关系。此外，我们还研究了外部危机的不同影响，以 COVID-19 危机的关键动态方面（即 COVID-19 健康威胁和社交距离）为例。我们使用多层次方法（即时间、个人和团队层次）和多层次小组流程框架来检验我们的假设。对 703 个团队中的 3,506 名参与者进行的调查结果表明，VT 成员的协作行为随着时间的推移趋于收敛，从而导致协作行为共识的出现。此外，随着时间的推移，动态的 COVID-19 健康威胁会导致协作行为共识降低。此外，我们的结果表明，协作行为共识与 VT 性能部分正相关，对于协作结束时协作行为水平较低的 VT 尤为重要。讨论了这些发现的实际和理论意义。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。