The first in a series of research white papers: "An Overview of Remote Virtual Teams & Productivity" by June Langhoff is now available in the www.NewWOW.net library.
Are virtual teams the final answer to organizational creativity and economic growth? Or are they a response to economic necessity in an era of global off-shoring or simply the latest management fad?
We set out to discover the latest research on productivity and virtual teams. To accomplish this, we limited virtual teamwork to tasks performed by knowledge workers. This work is characterized by the act of creating, using or sharing information to accomplish a company’s strategic objectives. One of the challenges of understanding this new phenomenon is that it’s necessary to span many perspectives. We looked at nearly 70 technical papers from the fields of psychology, management, and information technology during our search.
Our task was complicated by a multitude of labels for virtual teamwork, including electronically mediated groups, distributed teams, telecommuting, ad hoc networks, mobile work, global teaming, partially collocated or partially mobile teams, collaborative distance networks, far-flung teams. Definitions differed. Researchers defined global virtual teams as temporary, culturally diverse, geographically dispersed, electronically communicating work groups (Jarvenpas & Leidner, 1999); a team where members’ backgrounds are culturally diverse, and members are able to think and work with the diversity of the global environment (Zakaria, Amelinckx & Wilemon, 2004); far-flung teams (FFTs) as virtual teams whose members are geographically distributed and cross-functional yet working on highly interdependent tasks (Malhotra & Majchrzak, 2004); groups who interact through interdependent tasks guided by common purpose, and work across space, time, and organizational boundaries primarily through electronic means (Malhotra & Majchrzak, 2003).
