The Object Oriented Team: Lessons for Virtual Teams from Global Software Development

We investigated coordination and communication processes in global virtual software development teams in three Indian multinational technology firms. While some of the teams in our study experienced many of the same things observed in prior research, some operated in strikingly different ways, so different, in fact, that they led us to propose a new type of organization for global virtual teams: the object-oriented team. In contrast to the traditional virtual team approach which strives to tightly couple team members through information rich media such as face-to-face and telephone communication, the object-oriented team strives to decouple team members through the use of well defined processes and semantically rich media that clarify, extend and constrain meaning. The set of principles embodied in the objectoriented team we believe may be applicable to many types of virtual teams, especially larger teams facing complex problems.