Virtual Teams

Virtual teams were almost unheard of a decade ago, but today they are an integral part of every organization. The recent “offshore outsourcing” trend and the growth of the Internet and similar globally linking technologies are major contributor to the increase in the use of virtual teams. Virtual teams are made up of people working on interdependent tasks and interacting largely via communication technology to achieve a common goal without concerns of time and space. Such teams carry out many critical functions, including information collection and dissemination, decision making, and implementation.

Virtual teams present new challenges to business leaders. Cultural, geographic, and time differences make it challenging for a leader to provide structure to followers, evaluate their performance, inspire and develop them, and enable them to identify with the organization. As Avolio, Kahai, and Dodge (2001) indicate, there are new frontiers rapidly opening focusing on what constitutes effective leadership in the information environment. Both the research community and organizations can benefit by examining the topic of leadership in virtual teams. Researchers and practitioners need to know the role of a virtual team’s “virtuality” in influencing leader-follower interactions and its effects on a leader’s and team’s performance. With this objective in mind, we welcome submissions that address the topic of virtual team leadership. Examples of relevant topics also include (but are not limited to):

The trend toward physically dispersed work groups has necessitated a fresh inquiry into the role and nature of team leadership in virtual settings. To accomplish this, we assembled thirteen culturally diverse global teams from locations in Europe, Mexico, and the United States, assigning each team a project leader and task to complete. The findings suggest that effective team leaders demonstrate the capability to deal with paradox and contradiction by performing multiple leadership roles simultaneously (behavioral complexity). Specifically, we discovered that highly effective virtual team leaders act in a mentoring role and exhibit a high degree of understanding (empathy) toward other team members. At the same time, effective leaders are also able to assert their authority without being perceived as overbearing or inflexible. Finally, effective leaders are found to be extremely effective at providing regular, detailed, and prompt communication with their peers and in articulating role relationships (responsibilities) among the virtual team members. This study provides useful insights for managers interested in developing global virtual teams, as well as for academics interested in pursuing virtual team research.

Virtual teams are a great way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time.

Such teams are used more and more by companies and other organizations to cut travel, relocation, real estate, and other business costs. This is particularly so for businesses that use virtual organizations to build global presence, outsource their operations, or need less common expertise or skills from people who are reluctant to travel or relocate from their home locations.

Virtual teams are governed essentially the by same fundamental principles as traditional teams. Yet, there is one critical difference. This difference is the way