Virtual Teams (VTs) offer great advantages but have different challenges compared with co-located teams. This study explores using blogs and email to see if improvements can be made to virtual team effectiveness. This preliminary study is qualitative in nature and uses a quasi-experiment to compare 2 teams performing the same project; one uses email while the other uses a blog tool. Once the pr...

Integration is the essence of current research and development (R&D) activity in many organizations. Integration can be established in various ways depending on the type, size and intricacy in organizational functions and products. Nevertheless, research and development (R&D) has become an inevitable function in most manufacturing companies in order to develop their own product niches for their...

There has been growing interest in virtual teams, and more specifically in virtual software development. Requirements engineering, which is seen as a crucial phase in software development provides another dimension when software development occurs in a virtual setting. While formal software development methods are the obvious first choice for project managers to ensure a virtual information sys...

Global virtual teams (GVT) are increasingly using virtual workspace technology (VWT) which allow for multiple forms of interaction between team members. However, there is limited empirical and theoretical research on how the use of these technologies depends on the communication context of the teams. We extend recent theorizing about technology support for virtual communication to suggest that ...

The results from prior studies on the effectiveness of virtual teams (VTs) are ambiguous and show that few studies have built upon previous findings to build a substantiated body of work. In this article, the authors attempt to remedy this by performing a meta-analysis on VT research. Powell et al.’s (2004) framework of VTs is used as a prototype and twelve variables and their relationships ide...

Although a tremendous amount of research in the last decade has begun to disentangle interaction factors and performance outcomes associated with virtual teams, significant gaps still exist in our understanding, particularly in terms of virtual team leadership. Shared leadership may be particularly important to virtual teams, where team members’ separation from the leader and from one another m...

The working style of virtual R&D team is becoming more and more popular, so lots of researchers concern about the performance of virtual R&D teams. Shared mental model (SMM) is a concept in psychology which is defined as a common thinking style developed by similar experience and individual mental models. In this paper, we consider two types of SMM, which are task-related SMM and member-related...

In this paper we present our approach in creating Collaborative Virtual Environments to provide distributed collaborative teams with a virtual space where they can meet as if face-to-face, coexist and collaborate while sharing and manipulating a set of virtual data in real time. Thereby our approach moves beyond mere integration of video-conferencing and scienti c visualization, to create a des...

This paper reviews experiences from a research project into international collaborative learning, involving trials between virtual teams of students at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and Uppsala University (UU) in Sweden. In this research-linked model of teaching, several issues have arisen, associated with motivating students to participate in a research project as an integral element...