Procedural Justice and Identification with Virtual Teams: The Moderating Role of Face-to-Face Meetings and Geographical Dispersion

We investigated the previously unstudied relationship between procedural justice and identification within virtual teams, with a particular focus on how two features of virtual teams, namely frequency of face-to-face meetings and geographical dispersion, moderate that relationship. We argue that these two variables are sources of uncertainty, which in turn makes virtual team members more sensitive to perceptions of procedural fairness as essential cues in the identification process. In this study, we used cross-sectional survey methodology and data aggregated to the team level (N = 39). As predicted, our results showed that the link between procedural justice and identification was stronger when there were few face-to-face meetings and when teams were highly dispersed.