Virtual work has become a defining feature of modern organizations, intensifying the need for strategies that support virtual team performance. Communication delays—prolonged intervals between sending and receiving messages—are one of the most persistent and consequential barriers to virtual team performance. However, effective mitigation strategies remain scarce, likely due to an incomplete understanding of the explanatory mechanisms linking delays to team performance. Adopting a dynamic view of teamwork, we propose that delays impair team performance by disrupting collective attention—the synchronous focus of team members on a shared target. Building on the collective attention literature, we identify three factors that help teams sustain collective attention during communication delays: task experience, which strengthens members’ capacity to coordinate attention; message simplicity, which increases the clarity of attentional cues; and shared leadership, which enhances social connectivity and mutual engagement. We test our framework in two studies. Study 1, a longitudinal spaceflight simulation, demonstrates that collective attention mediates the negative relationship between communication delay and team performance, and task experience buffers this effect. Study 2 uses a calibrated agent-based model (ABM) to simulate how collective attention networks evolve under varying levels of communication delay, task experience, message simplicity, and shared leadership. Results show that collective attention is best sustained when teams combine high task experience with clear communication and distributed influence. Together, these studies position collective attention as a central mechanism explaining how communication delays degrade team functioning and offer a multi-pronged intervention framework for sustaining it amid the challenges of virtual teamwork.
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