Virtual teams and the organisational grapevine (original) (raw)

The communication process in virtual teams

Informatica Economica, 2007

The purpose of this paper is to present the paradigms of virtual teams in the communication process in the context of the existing literature in this field. We argue the above issues and we explore the communication process within virtual teams like an interactive, complex and limiting process in connexion with the advantages and disadvantages offered by information technology.

The significance and managerial challenges of virtual teamworking

Proceedings of the International Conference on Business Excellence

Living in a world where technology has evolved in an alarming pace, the working structures have become more diverse adapting to this trend, and giving birth to virtual teams, thanks to the ITC tools that have broken the physical boundaries, allowing coworkers to connect from all corners of the world and construct together. The aim of the article is to enrich the effectiveness of virtual teams but also acknowledge the difficulties they may run into throughout their project completions. Mixed methodology was chosen for the study case, having the Romanian Tourism Heritage Federation members as the sample of the survey. The quantitative method was used to quantify the data offered by the surveyed candidates and offer a deeper insight, by collecting data regarding certain aspects of the candidate such as: age, education and experience level, online “literacy”, size and role of the team member etc. and presented in a well-structured figure table. Whereas, the qualitative method concentrat...

Virtual teams in organizations

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Organizations continue to widely adopt virtual teams as a primary way to structure work and the recent growth in utilization has outstripped theory and research on virtual teams. The explosive growth in virtual team use by organizations and the inherent challenges of virtual teams highlight the need for theory and research to inform organizations in designing, struc-turing and managing virtual teams. Therefore, the purpose of this special issue is to (a) advance theory and research on virtual teams, (b) offer new directions for research on the topic, and (c) contribute to efforts to enhance the effectiveness of virtual teams in organizations. Toward this end, in this introduction we provide a brief overview of virtual teams and present an input-process-output framework to contextualize and organize the eight papers appearing in this special issue. Virtual teams are work arrangements where team members are geographically dispersed, have limited face-to-face contact, and work interdependently through the use of electronic communication media to achieve common goals. Virtual teams connect knowledge workers together over time and distance to combine effort and achieve common goals (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). Over the past several decades, there has been an explosive growth in organizations' use of virtual teams to organize work and this trend is expected to only continue in the future. For example, a recent survey of 1372 business respondents from 80 countries found that 85% of the respondents worked on virtual teams and 48% reported that over half their virtual team members were members of other cultures (RW 3 CultureWizard, 2016). The growth is attributable to factors including globalization, distributed expertise, organizations' need for rapid product development and innovation, and improved networking and collaboration technologies that support e-collaboration (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008). The use of virtual team structures holds great promise as virtual teams can do things collectively that collocated teams cannot. Some advantages of virtual teams include: the ability to assemble teams that maximize functional expertise by including professionals who are geographically dispersed, enabling continuous 24/7 productivity by using different time zones to their advantage, lowering costs by reducing travel, relocation and overhead, and sharing knowledge across geographic boundaries and organizational units and sites. In spite of the advantages of virtual teams, research has demonstrated that virtual teams present a number of challenges compared to co-located teams. Some disadvantages include communication and collaboration difficulties, low levels of media richness compared to co-located teams, potentially lower team engagement by team members, difficulties in creating trust and shared responsibility among team members, isolation, high levels of social distance between members, and challenges in monitoring and managing virtual teams.

Virtual Working in Teams: An Exploratory Survey of Barriers

2002

Grateful thanks to the staff of the Rand Afrikaans University, especially Rita Kellerman (for talking me into this), Jannie Zaaiman (for supervising my dissertation) and Karel Stanz (for his dual roles as the project manager of the course and as a fellow student).

WORK TOGETHER… WHEN APART CHALLENGES AND WHAT IS NEED FOR EFFECTIVE VIRTUAL TEAMS

Increasingly competitive global markets and accelerating technological changes have increased the need for people to contact via electronic medium to have daily updates, the people those who could not able to meet face to face every day. Those who contact via electronic medium i.e. Virtual Team, are having number of benefit but to achieve these potential benefits, however, leaders need to overcome liabilities inherent in the lack of direct contact among team members and managers. Team members may not naturally know how to interact effectively across space and time. By this paper author try to throw some lights on the challenges that virtual team faces and try to elaborate what is needed for Virtual Team.

Virtual team-working and collaboration technologies

An introduction to work and organizational psychology – a European perspective, 2008

Due to the increasing decentralization and globalization, many organizations have introduced distributed groups and teams, often called “virtual teams.” Virtual teams are components of distributed organizations, whose members work apart for a joint goal and mainly communicate and collaborate via information and communication technologies (ICT). The key feature of “virtuality” is the use of ICT technologies to enable communication and collaboration, in addition to the geographical distance of employees and their workplaces from each other. By definition, in an entirely virtual organization, all the communication and collaboration takes place through collaboration technologies without meeting face to face. In practice, most distributed groups and teams are virtual to varying degrees. On the organizational level, many terms have been used to refer to this type of organization, such as a “virtual organization,” “a dispersed or distributed organization,” “a network organization,” and “a telework organization.”