Group maintenance in technology-supported distributed teams

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether virtual teams that exhibit high levels of group maintenance behavior, pro-social, discretionary, and relation-building behavior between members that maintains reciprocal trust and cooperation, are more successful. We answer this question through a content analysis of email archives from two Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) teams. The two teams provide a useful contrast for our study because one continues operating today, while the other has ceased development. Our results show that, contrary to expectations, the groups show very low levels of organizational citizenship behaviors and high levels of positive politeness actions, those that build group cohesion. We build this argument through a time-series regression with appropriate success measures for the self-organizing and voluntary FLOSS context.