The Research
Global Teaming Intelligence grew out of my PhD research on what helps people thrive in global virtual teams. While I was focused on understanding what influences thriving on global virtual teams, I found that those who were thriving were also collaborating differently.
There was a distinct difference between “camera on collaboration” and collaboration as more of a meta-cognitive approach for interacting with others.
Thriving at work describes a state in which people experience both learning — a sense of continuous growth and development — and vitality — energy, psychological bandwidth, and engagement with work. It is distinct from traditional engagement measures, which focus on commitment and involvement. Thriving captures whether people are developing and sustaining energy while doing their work.
Because global virtual teams operate under conditions of ambiguity, distance, and cultural difference, they provide an important context for studying how thriving emerges — and what gets in the way.
The Theoretical Foundation
In addition to my research, GTI integrates five bodies of research: the Socially Embedded Model of Thriving at Work, Self-Determination Theory, Cultural Intelligence, Transactive Memory Systems, and the Theory of Action — translating academic insight into a practical framework for improving clarity, trust, and shared ownership in globally distributed teams.
The Ongoing Research
The GTI Research Project continues to explore how collaboration patterns evolve as work becomes more globally distributed and increasingly supported by artificial intelligence. Through the GTI assessment and open dataset, the project studies patterns such as coordination speed, ownership clarity in AI-assisted environments, and how information moves through distributed teams.
The goal is to make collaboration systems more visible, measurable, and improvable for teams around the world.
Work is becoming more global, more digital, and more complex. Organizations often focus on developing individual skills, but the research suggests that thriving and effectiveness depend just as much on how trust and collaboration systems are designed. Global Teaming Intelligence offers a way to study and improve those systems.
