Strategy and Structure in a Virtual Organization

Journal or Organizational Perspectives in Organization Behavior, Management, and Leadership, 2015

The study of organizational structure and strategy in virtual organizations is a broad and current topic. This literature review includes a number of virtual organizational theorists’ and authors’ positions and philosophies about how structure and strategy affect the virtual organization. The virtual organization emerged as a need existed to conduct business in a fast-paced, innovative, global market place whose reach to clients and customers is exponentially staggering as the world has moved to another plateau in conducting business. In order for the virtual organization to be successful, leadership (E-leaders) must be able to depend on the structure of the organization to support the strategy necessary to build a business that could thrive. The structure of the organization must include talented people who are innovative and visionary within this new entity, and leaders need to learn how to lead, manage, and earn trust in this environment. The rhetoric concerning virtual organizat...

The continuous innovation in IT leads to VO concept. There are several reasons of this transformation such as: cope with new demands, and radical change in IT, gain competitive advantage, cost reduction, increasing performance, flexibility, and productivity, and involved suitable human skills from different places. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the VO concept, its evolution, characteristics, challenges associated with its implementation and proposed solution to compensate these difficulties, which led to the employment of virtual organization to become strategic tool in many organization. Real life examples will be shown, how it was used by organizations in past and present, and in the future.

Virtual organizations are new organizational forms comprising a set of network transactions that differ from those found in markets and hierarchies. This paper explores the nature of these network transactions through an in-depth study of a virtual firm. The virtual organization is characterized by constant organizing through virtual teams and alliances, a unique management culture and a set of norms, information and knowledge sharing enabled by information technology, and employee selfgovernance. The organization gains from a culture of fast-response and efficiency while employees are trusted to exercise discretion and take initiatives. Center for Digital Economy Research Stem School of Business IVorking Paper IS-97-03 * By complexity, we imply the multidisciplinary bases of information required to create knowledge in the form of new products and services (Winter, 1987).

Procceedings of T-World, 2001

The objective of this paper is to study, how well the new organizational forms called virtual organizations are functioning. The ultimate purpose is to develop a more coherent theoretical account of virtual organizations and their various forms, e.g. teams, companies and networks. The practical aim is to develop bases to analyse and model virtual organizations. In the first chapter, reasons for the emergence of virtual organisations are discussed. The second chapter deals with the background of virtual organizations, the concept 'virtual organization' is defined, and different forms of virtual organizations as objects of the study are described. The third chapter summarizes some empirical findings concerning virtual organizations including three own case studies. Advantages, disadvantages and some managerial implications are presented. And finally, questions are dealt, what to study in virtual organizations, and how to study them empirically. This review is based on selected written material and on three own case studies.

IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing

The need to remain competitive in the open market forces companies to concentrate on their core competencies while searching for alliances when additional skills or resources are needed to fulfill business opportunities. The changing business situation of companies and customer needs have motivated researchers to introduce Virtual Organization (VO) idea. A Virtual Organization is always a form of partnership and managing partners and handling partnerships are crucial. Virtual organizations are defined as a temporary collection of enterprises that cooperate and share resources, knowledge, and competencies to better respond to business opportunities. This paper presents base concepts of virtual organizations including properties, management concepts, operational concepts, and main issues in collaboration such as security and authentication.

1997

Conceptualizations of VO and uses of this term by both business press and firms increase, while theoretical controversies persist and evidence of VO remains meager and inconclusive. The research model proposed in this paper comes from an information perspective, places information technology in the central role, and intends to help resolve theoretical controversies and enrich evidence of VO.

Herausforderungen an das Management, 2006

2003

After an initial phase in which the basic virtual organizations infrastructures and pilot cases, mostly biased by traditional business practices, were developed, there is a vital need to conduct fundamental research in order to understand the emerging behavior of new collaborative organizational forms. There is no single formal modeling tool/approach that adequately covers all perspectives yet. In this direction, a research approach to establish a sound theoretical foundation is proposed. As a starting basis, contributions from different disciplines, such as complex systems theory, game theory, etc, are suggested. Finally a roadmap for future research to understand, characterize, and better support this paradigm is briefly introduced.

Virtual Organizations (VO) are seen as possible solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) to overcome disadvantages attributed to their size. Although several examples are well described in the literature, the VO domain still needs clarification in terms of VO types and characteristics. This paper aims at exploring different designs of VOs by investigating structural patterns of 30 VOs. The authors develop an analysis framework, the Virtual Profile, which allows profiling each case along structural dimensions. The analysis shows that, in practice, most of the VOs are based on prior relationships of collaborators with a strong focus on core competencies that intend to cooperate on a long-term basis. Apart from these common characteristics, structural differences between two types of VOs are identified. The resulting typology of two main types-"emerged" (internally driven) and "initiated" (externally driven) VOs-contributes to an explanation of VO types in l...

Organizational virtualness, 1998

VoNet the Newsletter @ http://www.virtual-organization.net as well as the newslist VoTalk celebrate their one year existence. In this time it has gained a lot of attention by researchers and also by managers. To concentrate on the topic of organizational virtualness we will organize a workshop for presentation and discussion of research in progress in April 1998. Virtualness -as we know from your contributions to VoNet and VoTalk -not only consists of computer mediated communication but also needs face-to-face meetings to intensify social connectivity and awareness among groups of people concerned with the same activities. Therefore we would be pleased to meet you for a two day workshop in Berne, Switzerland. The topic of the workshop will be organizational virtualness including all the research activities and practical experiences that focus on organizational structure, behavioral patterns and technological support of virtual organizations as well as virtual organizations in a global operation, the management of virtual global organizations, etc.