The role of internal change agent in developing the relationship between knowledge sharing and performance in virtual team

The last decade has seen a distinct increase in the frequency of the appearance of virtual teams within contemporary organizations. As knowledge sharing within the virtual team leads to better team performance, a deeper understanding of enabling organizational capabilities is highly relevant to both researchers and managers. Therefore, in this paper we focus on the concept of "internal change agent support". More specifically, we use a qualitative research design to study the role of internal agent support within the relationship between knowledge sharing and virtual team performance. A theoretical model was built and verified by means of structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The authors found that internal change agent support has a moderating effect on relationship between knowledge sharing and the virtual team performance and the knowledge sharing within the virtual team influences positively virtual team performance. These results add to the emerging academic discussion on continuous change management within dispersed teams. Our findings are also relevant to managerial practice as they suggest how to facilitate the process of knowledge sharing in a team, thus improving its efficiency.