the article discusses a trial undertaken in a lis education program to help prepare students from different cultural backgrounds to work in virtual, multicultural work places.  the focus of the trial was developing teamwork, which may now involve global, multicultural and virtual components, for which students need to be prepared, given work place changes of recent years. the trial took place i...

The work of virtual teams is increasingly important to today’s organizations, work that is accomplished predominantly via computer-mediated communication. The authors investigate the moderating role of experience with instant messaging on the team interpersonal processes (cohesion and openness) to team effectiveness relationship in virtual teams. Data were obtained from 365 virtual team members...

This paper presents an experiment on the impact of Shared Mental Models (SMM) on creative virtual teamwork. We tested whether the usage of an online whiteboard influences the building of SMM in the initial phase of virtual teamwork. As SMM are the foundation for successful collaboration in teams, we transferred the construct on measuring the team task and team goal in a creative virtual team pr...

Trust has been identified as a key factor leading to successful relationship development in virtual teams. This study concentrates on trust and the challenges and possibilities in building trust through technology-mediated communication in virtual teams focussing on the creation stages of virtual team development. In order to understand the mechanisms and dynamics in trust building two case stu...

Introduction Decision makers today are faced with exceedingly complex problems that generally require the collaborative efforts of individuals from many different areas of expertise. The challenges of teamwork and collaboration are further exacerbated by the increasingly dispersed nature of teams today, particularly in terms of geography, time, and culture. One approach to facilitating collabor...

Boundaries such as time, distance, organization, and culture have been a useful conceptual tool for researchers to unpack changes in the virtual work environment, moving from a dichotomous perspective that contrasts face-to-face (FTF) and virtual work to a more nuanced hybrid perspective. However, researchers may tacitly assume that all members of a virtual team and virtual teams collectively w...

This paper investigates the effects of extraversion and team member expertise on virtual team interaction and performance. Sixty-three virtual teams of professional managers participated in an intellective decision making task using a web-based conferencing tool. The results revealed level of extraversion to be positively and significantly correlated with the aggressive and constructive interac...

Despite the differences between virtual and collocated teams, empirical studies have identified a number of challenges that virtual teams experience. We argue, in this work-in-progress study, that habits constitute a good explanatory factor for understanding behaviour in the virtual team environment. In this study, we analyse ‘offline’ habits in the cases of student-based global virtual teams a...

The work of virtual teams is increasingly important to today’s organizations, work that is accomplished predominantly via computer-mediated communication. The authors investigate the moderating role of experience with instant messaging on the team interpersonal processes (cohesion and openness) to team effectiveness relationship in virtual teams. Data were obtained from 365 virtual team members...