The Special Needs of Virtual Teams Oct 2005 (original) (raw)

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.

Nature of virtual teams: a summary of their advantages and disadvantages

Management Research News, 2008

PurposeThis paper aims to extend knowledge about virtual teams and their advantages and disadvantages in a global business environment.Design/methodology/approachBased on a literature review and reported findings from interviews with experts and practitioners in the field, the paper has identified and discussed the advantages and problems associated with creating and managing virtual teams.FindingsIn today's competitive global economy, organizations capable of rapidly creating virtual teams of talented people can respond quickly to changing business environments. Capabilities of this type offer organizations a form of competitive advantage.Originality/valueBy identifying the advantages and problems associated with virtual teams, organizations will be better able to successfully establish and manage such teams.

Fostering virtual teams: what companies could and should be doing

2013

Hitherto, given the technological advances and the increasingly globalized economy, organizations are adopting virtual teams. With e-teams starting to be the rule, it is of companies' interest to make sure teams perform effectively. This study was undertaken to identify what companies could (and should) be doing to improve the chances of success for virtual teams. To accomplish this, eight international managers were interviewed to know the main challenges felt within e-teams. The findings suggest firms should invest on e-leaders' development. Specifically, evidence suggests that having leaders knowing their team personally is crucial. Moreover, communication was the most felt challenge and the model proposes a set of challenges to address this. This research study provides insights for organizations confronted with the challenge of guiding multicultural teams geographically separated as well as academics interested in pursuing virtual team research.

Challenges In Managing Virtual Teams

Journal of Business & Economics Research, 2010

Many organizations are taking advantage of the opportunities to utilize new technologies to become more effective and efficient. One of the newer types of approaches to be used is the "virtual team." These are teams that are comprised of members who do not work at the same place or even at the same time. They may be spread across many time zones and may be located all over the world. These types of teams are made possible by advances in computer-mediated communication and software that allows people to work collaboratively on projects without being co-located or even working at the same time. Obviously, managing teams of this sort presents many, and sometimes unique, challenges. This paper addresses these issues, analyzes them, and offers suggestions for relevant management strategies.

Designing and Leading Virtual Teams

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

This paper condenses the outcome of my study and research on virtual teamswhich took shape in parallel with my research on the management of multinational companies since the mid-nineties and as virtual teams quickly emerged as a form of organizing technical and managerial work. Virtual teams are already relatively common in research and development, procurement, operations and supply chains, or client accounts, and are growing in all other functions, even top management. Virtual teams function quite differently from classic or traditional teams. Properly designed and managed, virtual teams deliver superior performance for an organization and become an important new source of value creation, a key source in a globalizing world. But if managers try to apply rules that govern classic teams to virtual teams, the results will be disappointing. What matters most in -virtual teams‖ is -virtual‖, not -teams‖. This implies that we may need to forget a lot of what we know about classic teams while developing new knowledge and skills to design and lead virtual teams effectively.

Virtual Teams and Management Challenges

As a result of globalization and advances in information and communication technologies, the increased use of virtual teams in business has become prominent. In the competitive environment companies are obliged to produce more rapidly, more effectively and more efficiently. It is necessary for them to put together different capabilities and services with the goal, through cooperation between suppliers and customers, service providers and scientific institutions to achieve firm’s objective with high quality. Nowadays shift from serial to simultaneous and parallel working in entity has become more commonplace. Literatures have shown that collaboration is as a meta-capability for companies. This article after define a virtual teams and its characteristics, addressing virtual environments and relationship with different challenges which organization should deal them such as management and employee challenges. Finally conclude that managers of company should invest less in tangible assets, but more in virtual team to generate knowledge, and in their employees’ creativity to stimulate incremental innovations in already existing technologies that will directly generate their future competitive advantage. Companies must educate everyone, not just virtual employees, on the virtual team culture but both employees and managers need to understand the dealing aspects with virtual team.

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.