Understanding organizational space between HQ and a remote team

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Global distributed teams (GDT) are often studied in literature, but seldom from a spatial perspective. However, GDTs and their members are embedded in organizational spaces. In this paper the primary interested is in studying the relevance of organizational space for understanding local and global contexts from a GDT. In this article a qualitative study of a globally distributed team is presented in which part of the team is located at headquarters (HQ) and part of the team is remote. The sub-teams experienced local organizational differences in terms of space, culture, way of working and politics that had implications for the global distributed team (GDT) as well as for coordination and communication between the GDT and their global organization. The study contributes by extending organizational space literature in terms of GTD awareness and embeddedness of multiple organizational spaces and how GTD members shape these multiple spaces.