Defining a Global Distributed Team (GDT) as an interdependent workgroup comprised of cultural diverse members based in two or more nations who share a collective responsibility for making or implementing decision related to a firm’s global strategy was Marietta Baba In her analysis these team also relied on technology as a medium for communication and coordination.

For GDT's to work successfully members share and integrate explicit and tacit knowledge and create new knowledge that adds value. In this case Knowledge is defined as aspect of cognition whose accuracy or correctness has been validated externally (a problem since ways of knowing are culturally constructed). In addition, there needs to be cognitive convergence: A process by which individual cognitive structures become more similar or overlapping overtime as people work together. (These teams have to use knowledge to reach their goals.)

To uncover the mechanisms that mediate cognition and performance on a GDT she and other researchers used ethnographic analyses that included: recording spontaneous conversations, coding of their behaviors, team documents, and reports from the team to access convergence or divergence. All of this was in the context of trying to understand whether or not they agreed on the task at hand and could successfully execute that goal.

Here were the obvious findings: GDT's that don't share physically conducive spaces, and unshared contexts across teams create cultural differences in cognition.

Here was the non-intuitive finding: Homogeneous clusters handing work off to other homogeneous clusters did not create cognitive convergence. This happened for two reasons:
Fault lines: Co-occurence of divergence differences in each place created stronger identities that overpowered previous commonalities
Power clusters: Heterogeneous concentration of people in a group with co-located key corporate assets created an exclusionary agenda of believed power.

I hope I captured this fascinating research accurately. Either way, if you are interested in learning more, consider Dr. Baba an expert to turn to.