A virtual team (also known as a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, or remote team) usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and rely on communication technology such as email, instant messaging, and video or voice conferencing services in order to collaborate. The term can also refer to groups or teams that work together asynchronously or across organizational levels. Powell, Piccoli and Ives (2004) define virtual teams as "groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks." As documented by Gibson (2020), virtual teams grew in importance and number during 2000-2020, particularly in light of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic which forced many workers to collaborate remotely with each other as they worked from home.
As the proliferation of fiber optic technology has significantly increased the scope of off-site communication, there has been a tremendous increase in both the use of virtual teams and scholarly attention devoted to understanding how to make virtual teams more effective (see Stanko & Gibson, 2009; Hertel, Geister & Konradt, 2005; and Martins, Gilson & Maaynard, 2004 to integrate information, knowledge, and resources from a broad variety of contexts within the same team, and to acquire and apply knowledge to critical tasks in global firms. According to Hambley, O'Neil, & Kline (2007), "virtual teams require new ways of working across boundaries through systems, processes, technology, and people, which requires effective leadership." Yet, teams with a high degree of "virtuality" are not without their challenges, These decentralized work arrangements were first named telework in the 1970s, defined as "work carried out in a location remote from the central offices or production facilities, where the worker has no personal contact with coworkers but is able to communicate with them electronically". Typically, the remote location is the home, though telework centers and remote offices are alternative locations. Since the introduction of home computers in the 1980s and laptops and mobile phones in the 1990s, increasing numbers of office workers have become able to work from different locations. Distributed work and telecommuting have become widespread practices, growing steadily in the United States and abroad. and by 2012, nearly 3.3 million American workers telecommuted for at least half of the time. Globally, an international survey of 254 senior-level executives revealed that staff in two thirds of their global firms were involved in distributed work.
Early research heralded virtual teams as a promising design for integrating firms and taking maximum advantage of innovation-creating capabilities. They were likewise touted as means to permit flexibility in the "where" of tasks, to allow workers to meet household needs, and to enable organizations to adapt work arrangements to changing environments and labor needs. Colleagues from different nations may bring different cultural values, mindsets, allegiances, and communication styles to the team.
Dynamic structure/membership refers to how often members leave and join the team, and to how stable or changeable members' roles are. The parts of the organization represented by virtual team members are likely to be highly differentiated in response to global competitive pressures and uncertain business environments, potentially hindering effective collaboration. Notably, the lower the level of integration, the greater the difficulty of developing shared understanding.
Mutual or collective trust is a shared psychological state that is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability based on expectations of intentions or behaviors of others within the team. As members are geographically dispersed and often from different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures, trust is difficult to establish in virtual teams. Thus, it is how the team is designed and managed that creates enabling conditions.
Design factors
There are a number of structures and systems which critically enable virtual team success. Design of a virtual team involves structuring the interactions; what kind of communication tools are used; how much face-to-face time will be possible, etc. These design factors fall into five categories: context, group structure, technology, people, and process.
First, those structures that comprise the organizational context include education and training, rewards, reviews such as performance evaluation systems, and selection. Second, the virtual team's structure works to promote task accomplishment through goals, leadership, task design, and social structures. Third, information technology provides the infrastructure for virtual collaboration by allowing teams to communicate and coordinate their work. The challenge here is determining which technologies are appropriate for what tasks and when. Fourth, the people who work in virtual teams should possess certain capabilities to work effectively with others, such as sufficient task related knowledge and skills. Further, team members need to have a tolerance for ambiguity to deal with the unstructured communication that characterizes virtual teamwork. Finally, one's team and work processes can help or hinder the creation of enabling conditions. This includes the creation of effectives means of communication, decision making, and conflict resolution by leaders and managers.
Virtuality and degree of differences
As explored above, Gibson & Cohen (2003) indicated that the relationship between design factors and enabling conditions is moderated by the degree of virtuality and degree of differences. Such strong team identity may help to allow for constructive controversy which enables the open sharing of views, knowledge and perspective coinciding with members' identities. As Gibson and co-authors (2020) found, teams with high resilience, tolerance for ambiguity, and strong team identification experienced less intrapersonal identity conflict and therefore thrived more at work.
Gibson and her colleagues (2021) further found that virtual teams were more effective when they were able to recognize cues indicating when existing technologies had become constraints and strategically change their technology affordances to accommodate shifts in knowledge management activities. Tan et al. found that teams which used their dialogue technique were more satisfied with decisions made in the team. One study found that a traditional team started out more satisfied than a virtual team. Then, in less than a year, the satisfaction of the virtual team rose and exceeded the satisfaction of the traditional team. Women were more satisfied than men with virtual teams and were also more satisfied compared to women in face-to-face teams. Team members that were more satisfied were more likely to have had training and used more communication methods compared to unsatisfied team members.
Types
The most common types of virtual teams include:
1. Networked teams
2. Parallel teams
3. Project development teams
4. Work, production or functional teams
5. Service teams
6. Offshore ISD teams
7. Global Virtual Teams
Networked teams
Generally, networked teams are geographically distributed and not necessarily from the same organization. These teams are frequently created and just as frequently dissolved; they are usually formed to discuss specific topics where members from the area of expertise, possibly from different organizations, pitch their ideas in the same discussion. Depending on the complexity of the issue, additional members to the team may be added at any time. The duration these teams last may vary significantly depending on how fast or slow the issue is resolved.
1. Preparations
2. Launch
3. Performance management
4. Team development
5. Disbanding
Preparations
The initial task during the implementation of a team is the definition of the general purpose of the team together with the determination of the level of virtuality that might be appropriate to achieve these goals. Purpose is generally translated into certain action steps for people to on with a defined structure consisting of common goals, individual tasks and results. A number of factors may affect the performance of members of a virtual team. For example, team members with a higher degree of focused attention and aggregate lower levels of temporal dissociation (or flow ) may have higher performance. Further, members with higher degrees of attention focus may prefer asynchronous communication channels, while those with low levels of flow may prefer synchronous communication channels. These decisions are usually determined by strategic factors such as mergers, increase of the market span, cost reductions, flexibility and reactivity to the market, etc. Management-related activities taking place during the preparation phase include drafting a mission statement, personnel selection, task design, rewards system design, organizational integration, and choosing appropriate technologies for the tasks at hand.
Launch
In many cases, at the beginning of virtual teamwork, members make a point to meet each other face-to-face. Crucial elements of such a "kick-off" workshop are getting acquainted with the other team members, clarifying the team goals, clarifying the roles and functions of the team members, information and training how communication technologies can be used efficiently, and developing general rules for the teamwork. As a consequence, "kick-off" workshops are expected to promote clarification of team processes, trust building, building of a shared interpretative context, and high identification with the team.
Getting acquainted, goal clarification and development of intra-team rules are also usually accomplished during this phase. Initial field data that compares virtual teams with and without such "kick-off" meetings confirm a general positive impact on team effectiveness, although more differentiated research is necessary. Experimental studies demonstrate that getting acquainted before the start of computer-mediated work facilitates cooperation and trust. Therefore, team members must choose technology carefully, in order to offer the affordances needed at a given point in time, as each technology brings with it a number of affordances as well as constraints for interaction. A series of psychosocial cues were identified by Gibson and her colleagues, which signal the need to shift to different technologies, because the current technology use is failing to meet the teams' needs. These cues pertained to how well information was being shared and understood by all team members, and the extent to which members were engaged in the team. Technologies which allow for higher media richness, such as video and screen-sharing, can help reduce inconsistencies in context and make communication more personal and effective.
For the management of motivational and emotional processes, three groups of such processes have been addressed in empirical investigations so far: motivation and trust, team identification and cohesion, and satisfaction of the team members. Since most of the variables are originated within the person, they can vary considerably among the members of a team, requiring appropriate aggregation procedures for multilevel analyses (e.g. motivation may be mediated by interpersonal trust). The steps of team developments include assessment of needs/deficits, individual and team training, and evaluation of training effects.
Virtual teams have become more pertinent due to COVID-19. For managers, some of the ways to foster virtual team growth and success include monitoring trust levels, focusing on communication improvements, fostering inclusion via emotional safety within a group, and actively discussing teamwork with the group frequently.
Disbanding and re-integration
Finally, while some teams remain ongoing and continue with new tasks or members, some virtual teams with shorter time frames go through a phase of disbanding and reintegration, during which members return to in-person offices or join other virtual projects. This disbanding and reintegration of team members is an important issue that has been neglected in both empirical and conceptual work on virtual teams. When virtual project teams have a short life cycle and reform again quickly, careful and constructive disbanding is crucial in order to maintain high motivation and satisfaction among employees. Members of transient project teams anticipate the end of the teamwork in the foreseeable future, which in turn can overshadow interaction with other team members and shared outcomes. The final stage of group development should be a gradual emotional disengagement that includes both sadness about separation and (in successful groups) joy and pride in the achievements of the team. Virtual teams also create a more accessible workplace for those who care for children or other family members, or workers who prefer flexible work arrangements for a wide range of reasons. By enabling more flexible and equal working conditions, virtual teams significantly expand the pool of available expertise, thereby allowing firms to acquire the best possible candidates.
Moreover, virtual teams' use of communication technologies also helps to mitigate some problems of cultural diversity. For instance, email as a medium of communication does not transfer accents and carries fewer noticeable verbal language differences than voice communication. Cultural barriers are not removed from the team, but are instead shielded from view in situations where they are irrelevant. In fact, simply understanding team diversity and accommodating it can strengthen the relationship between team members of different cultures. Part of this effect can be attributed to cultural diversity, which has been shown to positively impact group decision-making. The differing backgrounds and experiences of these group members also encourage creativity and create conflicting viewpoints, which make it more likely that multiple options are explored and considered.
Geographic reach
Multinational organizations often deploy global teams which span various national locations to serve as mechanisms for coordinating core operations across geographical and cultural boundaries. These virtual teams help to enhance knowledge sharing and integration across company locations, thereby expanding the geographic reach of firm operations at relatively low cost. Virtual teams further boost firms' ability to identify and transfer best practices across locations, resulting in a substantial improvement to the operational efficiency of each site while preventing any one site from "re-inventing the wheel". when managed correctly, virtual teams enable firms to take advantage of diverse and creative viewpoints. Notably, virtual teams are susceptible to intrapersonal identity conflict and struggle to develop a shared team vision due to strong identification with subgroups. A multi-country study, based on the GLOBE culture model conducted by Gibson and Gibbs (2006), found that virtual communication environments were experienced differently by people from different cultures.
However, Haas (2006) discovered that a mix of locals and cosmopolitans was optimal for global virtual team performance. Research examining product development efforts in over 20 firms has shown that when diverse members of project teams combined their perspectives in a highly iterative way to improve integrated information flow, they were more innovative. Ultimately, the exchange of diverse perspectives and information among global team members has been found to improve team and organizational performance through the generation of better knowledge sharing and higher quality solutions.
Reduction in relocation and travel
Virtual teams can save travel time and cost, significant expenses for businesses with multiple locations or having virtual clients located in multiple places. They also reduce disruption in the normal workday by not requiring an individual to physically leave their workspace. As such, virtual teams often require a longer time to reach decisions.
However, virtual work has implications for relational impoverishment at work due to lower frequency of face-to-face interactions and lowered richness of communication. One major hurdle in drawing definitive conclusions is that studies of this innovation appear in dispersed literatures including information systems, logistics, industrial relations, psychology, operations, real estate, management, attracting the interest of scholars in multiple disciplines.
Technology and common ground
When team members are highly dispersed, members are embedded in different external contexts and thus have less shared contextual knowledge, leading participants to take for granted common knowledge. Sole and Edmondson (2002) call this "situated knowledge," Transactive memory is difficult to establish in virtual teams as it is often not transferred to new members, contextual knowledge is not kept or well-documented, and communication is indirect or infrequent. Development of this type of common ground is particularly difficult in virtual teams which are structurally dynamic or experience high turnover, limiting the amount and variety of information that can be communicated across team members. A supportive communication climate includes variables such as participation in decision-making, encouraging members to speak up, raising differences for discussion, engaging in spontaneous and informal communication, providing unsolicited information, remaining open to new ideas and perspectives, and bridging differences by suspending judgment.
Another way to develop common knowledge rests on managers' ability to act as politicians to manage the power dynamic inside and outside the team. In one instance, a manager increased dialogue among team members by deliberately refraining from giving people answers in order to encourage them to cooperate and co-create knowledge.- inhibit open dialogue and can lead to uneven participation, one-way flows of knowledge, and exclusion. and limiting miscommunications. Furthermore, fostering knowledge repositories which seek to not only create new knowledge but record and catalogue existing knowledge helps to mitigate uneven information distribution and facilitate ongoing knowledge transfer. These practices help to bridge status differences and ensure team members are on the same page.
Differences in what information is salient
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) reduces nonverbal cues about interpersonal affections such as tone, warmth, and attentiveness, which contribute to message clarity and communication richness, and collaborators who use CMC often use more direct styles of communication with fewer social cues than those in face-to-face conditions. Zhao (2003) found that communicators use physical and linguistic "co-presence"- the subjective perception of closeness versus distance to make inferences about one another's knowledge. Virtual workers are likely to have reduced contact and exposure to strong organizational structures and processes (including organizational dress, symbols, rituals, and ceremonies) that typically foster organizational identification.
Moreover, practices such as informal conversations among colleagues, virtual "water cooler chat," personal introductions, and discussions on trivial topics help to build connectedness and trust among virtual teams. Asynchronous communication tends to be more difficult to manage and requires much greater coordination than synchronous communication. As Gibson et al. (2011) found, developing consistent, time-patterned routines of communication may help to build close working relationships. However, as Zhang, Yu and Marin (2021) point out, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees were forced to work remotely. The beginning of the pandemic was marked by a rapid transition to virtual work, closures of traditional workspaces, physical distancing requirements, difficulties distributing technology and adapting to at-home work conditions, and feelings of isolation and hopelessness among newly virtual employees. Likewise, while a supportive communication climate predicts satisfaction and commitment and includes variables such as participation in decision-making and communication openness, a necessary part of high-performing virtual teams. However, effective management and adherence to proper goal setting principles specific to the nature of work virtual teams require can lead to improved team effectiveness. and intercultural collaboration have revealed the importance of recognizing the uniqueness of individual constituents while also cultivating a sense of belonging to a collectivity. Research shows that members who identify with their team are more likely to display desirable individual workplace outcomes such as helping behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, lowered social undermining and social loafing, lessened workplace bullying, and fewer turnover intentions. Organizations prioritizing inclusion during the pandemic have adopted approaches including overtime pay, unlimited sick days, paid leaves of absence, free trials of higher education to help connect job seekers to opportunities, and donated medical supplies. Organizations which provided examples of positivity and resilience in online interactions were able to spark positive emotional contagion and increased vitality. Many organizations communicated simple messages of care and composure, offered morning meditation sessions, allowed pets on screen for relaxation, conducted online yoga and fitness sessions, and sent out care packages to employees. Furthermore, Shao et al. (2021) argue that workers' newfound flexibility in working from home or at the office is impacted by stressors they encountered on the previous day. This research has implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices, and how telework will unfold in a post-Covid world.
Another research concern centers on the nonnegligible chance of community transmission in the workplace which poses a threat to returning workers. However, firms varied significantly in the degree to which they took action to protect their employees. Steinbach, Kautz and Korsgaard (2021) found that these firm compensation actions were associated with a growth in positive stakeholder sentiment.