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...while demands are high, team performance often falls short of expectations and, at times, the team seems to be spinning apart. These managers have numerous concerns from start-up issues to long-term performance: What is my role as a virtual team leader? How can you build high-quality relationships when people seldom, if ever, see each other in person? How can I enhance the performance of my virtual team? How can virtual relationships be managed more effectively using the company's existing communication technologies? Is it possible to manage performance and ensure accountability at a distance?
The Challenge of Virtual Teams
The pressures associated with getting new products and services to worldwide markets are prompting organizations to choose the best people for these projects, regardless of their location. This has resulted in a rapid increase in distributed work groups, or virtual teams as they are more commonly known. Like any team, a virtual team works on interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose. But unlike traditional, collocated teams, a virtual team works across space, time, and organizational and geographic boundaries (Lipnack and Stamps, 1997; Moyntoya-Weiss, Massey and Song, 2001). Through advanced communication technologies, global teams are developing the ability to "work together apart" (Grenier and Meters, 1992), completing assigned projects while rarely, if ever, meeting face-to-face. Even as more organizations in literally every industry turn to virtual teams for a variety of purposes and functions, there are questions about the effectiveness of such teams, the role that team leaders should play, and the types of interventions that managers can use to launch and sustain these teams. This article examines these questions through an in-depth field study of a global virtual team, generating recommendations for effectively leading teams in a virtual world.
* Advantages
Virtual teams allow organizations to bring together critical contributors who might not otherwise be able to work together due to time, travel, and cost restrictions. In addition, virtual teams can enhance the available pool of resources by including people from outside the sponsoring organization, such as supply chain affiliates, members of partner organizations, or external consultants. Virtual teams also allow organizations to hire and retain the best people, who may be unable or unwilling to relocate, and to adapt and realign the team when project requirements change or team members are lost. Just as important, virtual teams facilitate the implementation of corporate-wide initiatives in global organizations and are especially valuable for companies in which these initiatives must adapt to local cultures.
* Concerns
While many challenges associated with virtual teams are similar to those of collocated teams, the difficulties are complicated by time and distance (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002; Cascio, 2000; Henry and Hartzler, 1998). Team leaders typically find that achieving alignment and commitment to the team's purpose are far more challenging for virtual teams, especially those that cannot meet face-to-face at the outset. Moreover, in the absence of face-to-face communication and interaction, virtual team members may have less understanding of each other, potentially contributing to misunderstandings and conflict.
To overcome these challenges, virtual teams rely heavily on communication and information technologies, such as company intranets, team conference calls, e-mail, video conferencing, and various groupware applications to tap into the intelligence expertise of team members. While the expansion of electronic communication technologies has facilitated a rapid increase in the use of such e-teams (Kostner, 2001), most virtual teams still rely heavily on travel and face-to-face interactions to create cohesiveness. Especially during team formation, for example, most prescriptions...
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