  Geographically distributed teams often face challenges in coordination and
collaboration, lowering their productivity. Understanding the relationship
between team dispersion and productivity is critical for supporting such teams.
Extensive prior research has studied these relations in lab settings or using
qualitative measures. This paper extends prior work by contributing an
empirical case study in a real-world organization, using quantitative measures.
We studied 117 new research project teams from the same discipline within an
industrial research lab for 6 months. During this time, all teams shared one
goal: submitting research papers to the same target conference. We analyzed
these teams' dispersion-related characteristics as well as team productivity.
Interestingly, we found little statistical evidence that geographic and time
differences relate to team productivity. However, organizational and functional
distances are predictive of the productivity of the dispersed teams we studied.
We discuss the open research questions these findings revealed and their
implications for future research.
