The corporate world is changing from boardroom meetings and group gatherings to a virtual team world. Mobile employees who work from home or a remote office are becoming more common. More and more companies are adopting virtual teams because they bring many advantages to organizations and their employees. However, virtual teams carry additional complexity and increase risk of unsuccessful proje...

Virtual team represents an organizational form which can revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness. Growing inclination of organizations to indulge in virtual teamwork and significant utilization of virtual teams by organizations on a local as well as global basis necessitates investigating how such teams achieve success. A...

Some of the problems that multi-cultural virtual teams experience include: time delays in replies, lack of synergy among cross-cultural team members, communications breakdowns, unresolved conflicts among members, limited hours allowed to be worked and different holidays. This paper reviews major challenges faced by multi-cultural virtual teams and describes some managerial implications. Althoug...

This chapter reviews the extant empirical literature on virtual teams and presents what we know and what we don't know about them. Drawing upon the literature from both Organization Behavior and IS, we propose a framework that integrates the most important variables affecting virtual teams. The framework is then used to assess the effects of virtual teamwork on group processes and outcomes. The...

The paper systematises the previous research on trust in virtual teams, by examining how trust and other elements of social capital can be created in virtual teams and where the value created by social capital resides. The study is guided by three main questions: What value can social capital create for virtual teams and organisations? How are social capital elements interlinked? What are the d...

Virtual instruments and tools are future trends in Engineering which are a response to the growing complexity of engineering tasks, the facility of communication and strong collaborations on the international market. Outsourcing, off-shoring, and the globalization of organisations’ activities have resulted in the formation of virtual product development teams. Individuals who are working in vir...

Many organizations are forming “virtual teams” of geographically distributed knowledge workers to collaborate on a variety of workplace tasks. But how effective are these virtual teams compared to traditional face-to-face groups? Do they create similar teamwork and is information exchanged as effectively? An exploratory study of a World Wide Web-based asynchronous computer conference system kno...

In this paper, we present a theoretical model on the relationships among group atmosphere, shared understanding, and perceived task conflict in virtual teams. We validate the theoretical model by analyzing data that was collected in a laboratory experiment on virtual teams. We find that cultural diversity of virtual team adversely affects group atmosphere and group atmosphere has a positive inf...

Contemporary competitive demands have forced many organizations to increase levels of flexibility and adaptability in their operations. A growing number of such organizations have explored the virtual environment as one means of achieving increased responsiveness. In particular, the use of virtual teams appears to be on the increase. However, the increased use of virtual teams has not been acco...

Organizations depend on teams for their success, and as information technology (IT) capabilities have improved they have increased their use of virtual teams. Virtual teams allow organizations to dynamically adjust to changing needs, but present unique leadership challenges. There is currently little theory on how leadership works in virtual teams and few studies that provide empirical evidence...