Charter Quality in International Business Courses: Does it Really Matter?
William H.A. Johnson
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Charles Wankel
St. John’s University, New York, USA
Vas Taras
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA
Volume 21: 2026, pp. 00-00; ABSTRACT
Previous research shows that the use of team charters or contracts may be helpful for
process management but does not result in higher quality outcome performance for global virtual
teams (GVTs). However, this begs the question, does the quality of the team charter matter? We
extend the research on charters and show that when considering the quality of the team charters and
comparing the top and bottom quartiles of charter quality, differences in GVT outcome performance
were marginally significant (at p=0.051). Teams that reported increasing process conflicts (but not
task or relationship conflicts) reported conflicts to the project’s administration and also referred to
their charters. On the other hand, when teammates had greater respect for each other, they reported
more conflicts to the administration. This suggests that informal processes may be more important
than formal deliverables such as team charters in terms of effectuating GVT outcome performance.
However, we found charters consistently important to process management, suggesting that they are
still useful project management devices. Implications and suggestions for effective use of charters
are reported in the paper.
Keywords: team charter, team contract, global virtual team, quality, performance.
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