Virtuality in Organizations and Communities

The push and pull provided by information technology and rapidly changing business demands have led to virtual work becoming increasingly important in organizations today. Virtual work can take the form of geographically distributed teams in supply chain to telecommuting to global project development teams. Virtuality is also an increasingly common characteristic of work communities, where individuals become part of groups and/or organizations that have no physical co-location, and often do not meet each other, except for virtual encounters. As managers struggle to adjust to new and evolving realities in light of the September 11 terrorist attacks (e.g., time-consuming travel constraints, the need to have distributed and redundant resources), we expect these innovative ways of organizing to continue to grow.