Virtual Team Efficacy Theory: An Integrative Sociotechnical Understanding of the Emergence and Ramifications of Collective Efficacy in Virtual Teams

Digital technologies hold immense potential for enhancing collaboration and teamwork. Collective-level efficacy, or the collective belief in the ability to collaborate effectively, is a crucial factor influencing traditional team performance that is now being explored in the context of digitally enabled virtual teams. However, despite the idiosyncratic challenges of virtual teams, researchers studying collective-level efficacy’s effects tend to directly apply traditional team concepts, which do not account for the unique attributes of technology-mediated teamwork. This approach blurs the distinctiveness of virtual teams and provides an incomplete view of how collective-level efficacy forms and operates during virtual collaborations. Reinforcing this lack of clarity, most studies concentrate on empirically assessing collective-level efficacy’s relationships with other variables rather than on how it develops and functions in virtual settings. Thus, a notable omission from the literature is the singular focus on the unique nature, evolution, and consequences of collective-level efficacy in virtual team environments. The current study addresses this need by integrating and extending components of collective efficacy, collective cognition, and media synchronicity theories to craft a novel conceptual framework of virtual team efficacy theory (VTET). This comprehensive theoretical framework explains how virtual team efficacy (VTE), a virtual team-specific conceptualization of collective-level efficacy, emerges and subsequently impacts downstream outcomes during a multifaceted technology-mediated collective cognitive process unique to these settings. © 2025 INFORMS