VIRTUAL TEAMS

Virtual Teams

Virtual Teams

A virtual team is a group of individuals who work interdependently, are located at a distance from each other, and conduct most of their collaboration through communications technology (rather than face-to-face). A “pure” virtual team is one in which each member is geographically distant from each other member, but more often, at least some of the members are likely to be collocated (Markus, 2006).

As organizations become more global and outsource more of their work, and as trends such as hot desking and telecommuting become popular in some professions, more and more business is being conducted across geographic distance. In many organizations today, it is not possible to locate everyone at the same site. This fact, in combination with the recent proliferation and improvement of communications technology, means that the use of virtual teams is likely to become more common (Majchrzak, 2007).

Despite the dispersion of team members in virtual teams, organizations want to benefit from bringing together employees with diverse expertise without spending too much on travel. Although some travel is still likely to be necessary, the aim is to allow these geographically dispersed individuals to work together while they are apart. This work typically takes place through communications technologies such as e-mail, the telephone (including audio conferences), voice mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, shared desktops, intranet sites, and other interactive computer-based tools. Although traditional colocated teams may make use of some of these technologies, virtual teams rely on them more heavily because they cannot easily arrange face-to-face contact (Cunha, 2008).

The use of virtual teams in organizations results from the confluence of two trends: the trend toward mediated interaction in organizations and the trend toward the use of teams as the building blocks of organizations. The use of computer-mediated interaction in corporate settings has reached a stage where information and communication technologies can be used to coordinate complex tasks, to exchange information, and even to share experiences. At the same time, companies have found the benefits of using teams for many different types of tasks (Markus, 2006).

The benefits of virtual teams come from their members' use of information and communication technology, especially computer-mediated communication, to overcome one of the chief limitations of teamwork—the need for co presence. To understand the development of the concept of virtual teams, it is necessary to understand the development of computer mediated communication in organizations, the development of teamwork in organizations, and how virtual teams bring these two concepts together.

Mediated interaction is one of the features of the modern corporation. The size of these organizations prevents its members from carrying out all their interactions face-to-face. Instead, managers and employees need to rely on multiple media for communication. The use of these media and the research on them has gone through three distinct stages. In the first stage, documented in studies such as (Majchrzak, 2007), managers and employees used information and communication technology mostly to convey limited amounts of information. These media were paper-based and were mostly used as a one-way communication channel—order forms, ...