A Preliminary Study Of Virtual Teams

The advances in ICT and also the advent of the Internet have changed the way we work in the new millenium. Virtual teamworking has already been practised extensively in the West but in the case of Malaysia, a developing country is still struggling to get a strong foothold. In lieu of the above this study looks at the impact of internal group dynamics, team characteristics on the effectiveness of a virtual team among manufacturing companies in the northern region of Malaysia. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 152 virtual teams from the multinational firms operating in Penang. The findings showed that team characteristics do not impact internal group dynamics or team effectiveness; while internal group dynamics correlates positively with virtual team effectiveness. Among the dimensions, it was found that team member relations correlates positively with both team performance and team member satisfaction, while team leadership was found to correlates positively with team member satisfaction. Thus it can be concluded that it is important for managers to maintain proper composition and characteristics of the virtual team, while concentrate more effort on the team member relations and team leadership to promote better team dynamics, Communications among team members need to be handled with care. Exessive communication using the wrong means, such as electronic communications, may have negative effects and causes dissatisfaction among team members. At the same time, increasingly, the conventional co-located (face-to-face) teams will endeavor to improve its performance and effectiveness by imitating some of the technologies and the characteristics of virtual team.