Virtual Team

Software development projects increasingly extend over the boundaries set by a single company, or country. As the a vailable communication media becomes more sophisticated, and more advanced technology costs less, the trends in software development move towards a more "virtual" nature. This evolutionary process allows individuals or even teams from different locations a nd cultures, with different expectations and goals, to blend in a virtual team of effectively collaborating and coordinating members.

Managers are challenged to develop strategically flexible organizations in response to increasingly competitive marketplaces. Fortunately, a new generation of information and telecommunications technology provides the foundation for resilient new organizational forms that would have not been feasible only a decade ago. One of the most exciting of these new forms, the virtual team, will enable organizations to become more flexible by providing the impressive productivity of team-based designs in environments where teamwork would have once been impossible. Virtual teams, which are linked primarily through advanced computer and telecommunications technologies, provide a potent response to the challenges associated with today's downsized and lean organizations, and to the resulting geographical dispersion of essential employees. Virtual teams also address new workforce demographics, where the best employees may be located anywhere the world, and where workers demand increasing technological sophistication and personal flexibility. With virtual teams, organizations can build teams with optimum membership while retaining the advantages of flat organizational structure. Additionally, firms benefit from virtual teams through access to previously unavailable expertise, enhanced cross-functional interaction, and the use of systems that improve the quality of the virtual team's work.

Abstract—Virtual teams give many advantages to organizations, including increased knowledge sharing and improve organizational performance. Virtual teams have altered the expectations and boundaries of knowledge worker’s interactions and make a new opportunity to develop the business. In this paper, we present summary results of an online survey. The online questionnaire was emailed by using a simple random sampling method to 356 Malaysian manufacturing small and medium –sized Enterprises (SMEs). The findings of this study show that SMEs in Malaysia are gaining to use virtual teams, and it can be concluded that virtual teams provide a new platform for developing the business in SMEs. Based on the study, we suggest avenues for future research that are important to advancing our understanding of virtual team effects on business growth. Keywords—Collaboration, virtual teams, SMEs, Entrepreneurship, Business development, Survey

Previous research [1, 2] has indicated that pair programming is better than individual programming when the pairs are physically colocated. However, important questions arise: How effective is pair programming if the pairs are not physically next to each other? What if the programmers are geographically distributed? An experiment was conducted to compare the different working arrangements of student teams developing object-oriented software. The teams were both colocated and in distributed environments; ...

The sharing of knowledge within teams is critical to team functioning. However, working with team members who are in different locations (i.e. in virtual teams) may introduce communication challenges and reduce opportunities for rich interactions, potentially affecting knowledge sharing and its outcomes. Therefore, using questionnaire-based data, this study examined the potential effects of different aspects of virtuality on a knowledge-sharing model. Social exchange theory was used to develop a model relating trust to knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing to team effectiveness. The moderating effects of virtuality and task interdependence on these relationships were examined. A strong positive relationship was found between trust and knowledge sharing for all types of teams (local, hybrid and distributed), but the relationship was stronger when task interdependence was low, supporting the position that trust is more critical in weak structural situations. Knowledge sharing was positively associated with team effectiveness outcomes; however, this relationship was moderated by team imbalance and hybrid structures, such that the relationship between sharing and effectiveness was weaker. Organizations should therefore avoid creating unbalanced or hybrid virtual teams.

Virtual teams, in which the members work from multiple locations, have become a common feature at many global organizations. In spite of this new reality, collocated teams experience difficulties in adapting their established processes and practices for a newly virtual working environment, greatly impeding their performance, productivity, and morale. In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative case study

This paper describes an experimental comparison of two reading techniques, namely Checklist-based reading (CBR) and Perspective-based reading (PBR) for Object-Oriented (OO) design inspection. Software inspection is an effective approach to detect defects in the early stages of the software development process. However, inspections are usually applied for defect detection in software requirement documents or software code modules, and there is a significant lack of information how inspections should be applied to OO design documents. The comparison was performed in a controlled experiment with 59 subject students. The results of individual data analysis indicate that a) defect detection effectiveness using both inspection techniques is similar (PBR:69%, CBR:70%); b) reviewers who use PBR spend less time on inspection than reviewers who use CBR; c) cost per defect of reviewers who use CBR is smaller. The results of 3-person virtual team analysis show that CBR technique is more effective than PBR technique.

Managing international teams with geographically distributed participants is a complex task. The risk of communication breakdowns increases due to cultural and organizational differences grounded in the geographical distribution of the participants. Such breakdowns indicate general misunderstandings and a lack of shared meaning between participants. In this paper, we address the complexity of building shared meaning. We examine the communication breakdowns that occurred in two globally distributed virtual teams by providing an analytical distinction of the organizational context as the foundation for building shared meaning at three levels. Also we investigate communication breakdowns that can be attributed to differences in lifeworld structures, organizational structures, and work process structures within a virtual team. We find that all communication breakdowns are manifested and experienced by the participants at the work process level; however, resolving breakdowns may require critical reflection at other levels. Where previous research argues that face-to-face interaction is an important variable for virtual team performance, our empirical observations reveal that communication breakdowns related to a lack of shared meaning at the lifeworld level often becomes more salient when the participants are co-located than when geographically distributed. Last, we argue that creating translucence in communication structures is essential for building shared meanings at all three levels.

Die Lösung von Problemen und die Entscheidung von strategischen Maßnahmen werden häufig Expertengruppen übertragen, da man sich Vorteile von ihrer Zusammenarbeit gegenüber einzeln arbeitenden Personen erhofft. Jedoch kennzeichnen Prozessverluste die Zusammenarbeit von natürlich interagierenden Gruppen, so dass viele Moderationstechniken wie die PROzedurale MODeration (PROMOD) entwickelt wurden, die das Ausmaß der Schwierigkeiten reduzieren. In dieser Studie wurde getestet, ob PROMOD auch im virtuellen Raum die Leistungsfähigkeit von Gruppen und Einzelpersonen verbessern kann (N = 180). Dazu wurde ihnen einen Interpolationsproblem (vgl. Dörner, 1976) vorgelegt, welches in moderierten und unmoderierten Bedingungen unter Verwendung von einem Chat-Programm und elektronischen Formularen gelöst werden sollte. Dieser Effekt konnte für eines der beiden erhobenen Leistungsmaße gezeigt werden (p = .0245).

Geographically distributed virtual teams are increasingly prevalent in global organizations. Despite the growing attention to virtual teams, there is limited understanding of how cross-cultural collaboration and electronic dependence in communication affect virtual workers' psychological reactions and well-being. This qualitative multi-case study aims at understanding the different causes of stress in cross-cultural collaboration. An overarching analysis across seven case studies revealed that globally distributed team members experienced job stressors such as language challenges in English, or lingua franca, misunderstandings, and conflicts due to different mindsets, communication and behavior styles, and work-leisure orientations. Without adequate skills in lingua franca, or proper cultural and local awareness of distant team sites, coping was not successful, thereby stressors lead to distress.

Effective leadership requires relationship skills such as -problem solving conflict management, motivation, communication, and listening [Yukl, G. A. (1998). Leadership in organizations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall]. Arguably, nothing is more important to a leader than the skills involved in communicating one's intent to followers, for it is only through effectively transmitting intent that followers may understand and then execute the goals of the team and leader. The modern work-world is dominated by computer-mediated communication, and this communication is the bread and butter of virtual teams; however, simple transmission of information from point A to point B is not enough -the virtual environment presents significant challenges to effective communication. In this paper we review issues related to virtual teams and developments in multimodal displays that allow teams to communicate effectively via single or multiple modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile). This discussion is grounded in guiding principles for design and use of information displays that were identified and culled based on multiple review criteria from an extensive review of the literature. We present an applied example of the utility of these guiding principles for multimodal display design, in the context of communicating a leader's presence to virtual followers via commander's intent.

Multi-cultural virtual teams are important due to the increasing globalization of organizations and proliferation of new network technologies. Global Virtual Teams rarely meet in a face-to-face context and thus encounter challenging problems not associated with traditional co-located teams. To understand the complex issues in a virtual project environment in developing countries, we conducted a research study encompassing these aspects in various software houses in Pakistan. The research study explores and identifies the major cultural challenges and operational and technical complexities faced by virtual project management. We propose a model showing positive reinforcing relationship between various factors of virtual project management thus resulting in effective virtual project management. 1. 0-7803-9139

Internet changed the perspective on meetings and also on decision making processes. Virtualization of meetings has become a common way for collaboration among employees, customers, partners, trainees and trainers, etc. Web conferencing allows the collaboration between teams' members to achieve common goals. Without the need of travelling and meeting organization, the web conferencing applications permit the participation of people from different location. Web conferencing applications are multimedia systems that allow various remote collaborations with multiple types of resources. The paper presents an exploratory study on multimedia web conferencing systems, its advantages and disadvantages and also a use case, meant to highlight several of this technology benefits and problems.

As the nature of work in today's organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been increasing emphasis on distributed, "virtual" teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this article is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and identifying implications for effective leadership. The authors focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, the authors distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where current knowledge applies and new research needs exist. Second, the authors distinguish among different types of virtual teams, considering the critical role of task complexity in determining the underlying characteristics of virtual teams and leadership challenges the different types entail. Propositions addressing leadership implications for the effective management of virtual teams are proposed and discussed.

We report a simulation study of virtual team meetings. Participants role-played companies collaborating on a design problem while supported by a range of IT tools, such as videoconferencing and shared applications. Meetings were analysed to investigate how sharing computing facilities, operating the technology, and company status, influenced communications. Significantly more talk occurred in larger teams where participants shared I.T. facilities BUT this extra talk was restricted to talk within a single location. No extra talk was shared across the virtual team via the communications link. Where facilities were shared, technology controllers dominated cross-site talk. To encourage free communication across distributed virtual teams we recommend providing each participant with their own communications facility even if this is technologically less advanced than if technology support were shared.

Distributed software development has become the norm for the software industry today. As a result many organizations are leveraging the expertise of their existing staff by establishing virtual teams. Here we outline the results from three independent case studies undertaken over a period of 8 years. The first study considered the operation of virtual teams whose members were situated in two locations in the same country. The second investigated why U.S. and Irish team members who worked very successfully while collocated, experienced serious problems when operating in virtual teams. The third focused on virtual testing teams with members based in Ireland and Malaysia. The Irish staffs had extensive experience of having projects offshored to them and were now responsible for offshoring part of their work. The results from each case study highlighted the importance and impact fear played and the consequences this had for the success of the respective strategies.

Metaverses are immersive three-dimensional virtual worlds in which people interact as avatars with each other and with software agents, using the metaphor of the real world but without its physical limitations. The ubiquitous availability of high speed Internet access has spurred enormous interest in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, both in terms of user gaming and as a new technological platform for global virtual collaboration. These environments have potential for richer, more engaging collaboration, but their capabilities have yet to be examined in depth. Of particular interest in this paper is the use of metaverses for virtual team collaboration. We develop a conceptual model for research in metaverses that is based on five key constructs: (1) the metaverse itself, (2) people/avatars, (3) metaverse technology capabilities, (4) behaviors, and (5) outcomes. We present an indepth characterization of metaverse technology capabilities from a socio-technical view that recognizes the potential for variation in emergent interaction and in outcomes. Example propositions and a discussion of key issues and challenges show how the model can be used to further research and practice in virtual teams in the context of these new environments.

The globalisation of activities associated with software development and use has introduced many challenges in practice, and also (therefore) many for research. While the predominant approach to research in software engineering has followed a positivist science model, this approach may be sub-optimal when addressing problems with a dominant social or cultural dimension, such as those frequently encountered when studying work practices in a globally distributed team setting. The investigation of such a team reported in this paper provides one example of an alternative approach to research in a global context, through a longitudinal interpretive field study seeking to understand how global virtual teams mediated the use of technology. The study involved a large collective of faculty and support staff plus student members based in the geographically and temporally distant locations of New Zealand, the United States of America and Sweden. Objective: Our focus in this paper is on the conduct of research in the context of global software activities, and in particular, as applied to the actions and interactions of global virtual teams. We consider the appropriateness of various methodologies and methods in enabling such issues to be addressed. Method: We describe how we undertook a substantial field study of global virtual teams, and highlight how the adopted structuration theory, action research and grounded theory methodologies applied to the analysis of email data, enabled us to deliver effectively against our goals. Results: We believe that the approach taken suited a research context in which situated practices were occurring over time in a highly complex domain, ensuring that our results were both strongly grounded and relevant to practice. It has resulted in the generation of substantive theory and techniques that have been adapted and applied on a pilot basis in further field settings. Conclusion: We conclude that globally distributed teamwork presents a complex context which demands new research approaches, beyond the limited set customarily applied by software engineering researchers. We advocate experimenting with different research methodologies and methods so that we have a more rounded repertoire to address the most important and relevant issues in global software development research, with the forms of rigour that suit the chosen approach.

Global virtual teams are faced with the challenge of developing trust in a technology-mediated context to overcome anxiety and uncertainty in their interactions. Research shows that adjustment is a function of an individual's ability to manage his or her anxiety and uncertainty in an unknown context . We propose that the type of cross-cultural training (CCT) received can infl uence cognitive adjustment in global virtual teams. Building on phenomenology and sense-making theory, we argue that training needs to develop global virtual team members' capabilities in dealing with the unknown rather than providing ready-made concepts of cultures. Managerial implications of our theoretical discussion of cognitive adjustment and how CCT infl uences it are discussed, as are directions for future research.

This qualitative study examines whether virtual projects present challenges that are different from conventional projects and how they might be more useful than face-to-face teams in delivering value in certain contexts. It takes a post-implementation and lessons learned approach to elicit the experiences of two distributed information technology projects within a global banking corporation. Findings indicate that time zone and cultural differences in particular, affected communication and team relations. Other barriers included more 'conventional' issues such as management agenda and leadership style, requirements creep, asymmetry in processes and unclear roles and responsibilities. Their presence exacerbated the relational difficulties between team members. However, success in terms of time, budget and value delivery was evident in both of the virtual projects -attributable primarily to the determination and outcome orientation of team members. The study concludes that virtual teams are useful for projects requiring cross-functional or cross-boundary skilled inputs and the key to their value creation is to have a defined strategy to overcome problems associated with at-distance cooperation.

In many corporations today, it is common to have teams with members located in dzfferent geographic locations, d~flerent time zones, and even diflerent countries. These virtual teams are strategically important to organizations as they adapt to constantly changing market and political conditions such as global outsourcing. Despite the research and investment in technologies supporting virtual work, it remains unclear how virtuality, or the conditions under which virtual teams work, affects performance. Prior research suggests performance of virtual teams runs the gamete from failure to success. A global understanding of the specific impacts of virtual work on peformance, positive or negative, remains elusive because researchers have not yet ascertained which aspects of virtuality are especially relevant in a given setting.

This study investigated the effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles and communication media on team interaction styles and outcomes. Teams communicated through one of the following three ways: (a) face-to-face, (b) desktop videoconference, or (c) text-based chat. Results indicated that transformational and transactional leadership styles did not affect team interaction styles or outcomes; that the mean constructive interaction score was higher in FTF than videoconference and chat teams, but not significantly higher in videoconference than chat teams; and that teams working in richer communication media did not achieve higher task performance than those communicating through less rich media. Finally, mean team cohesion scores were higher in FTF and videoconference than chat teams, but not significantly higher in FTF than videoconference teams. These results provide further evidence that communication media do have important effects on team interaction styles and cohesion.

One of the most critical organizational capabilities is learning to adapt to the new hypercompetitive global landscape. The capabilities needed in this evolving competitive context are increasingly employee centric, particularly when related to those employees who are performing knowledge-based teamwork in structures like global virtual teams (GVTs). This paper is an attempt at examining the organizational role of GVTs and the associated challenges for human resource management (HRM). A combination of agency -dynamic capabilities theoretical perspective is used to explore the staffing issues associated with GVTs in an effort to capture members' tacit knowledge that is increasingly viewed as an organization's key value-generating resource. Particular implications for the human resource managers in matching global virtual team member diversity to the specific tasks contexts are outlined in the paper. Finally, challenges to HRM in managing global virtual teamwork/ 'taskwork' are explored.

Metaverses are immersive three-dimensional virtual worlds (VWs) where people interact with each other and their environment, using the metaphor of the real world but without its physical limitations. Unique technology capabilities of metaverses have the potential to enhance the conduct of virtual projects, but little is known about virtual worlds in this context. Virtual project teams struggle in meeting stated project outcomes due to challenges related to communication, shared understanding, and coordination. One way to address these challenges is to consider the use of emerging technologies, such as metaverses, to minimize the impact on virtual project teams. Applying a theoretical foundation for virtual teams in metaverses that includes both technology capabilities and the social interaction that takes place in the metaverse environment, we conducted an empirical investigation of project teams in a virtual world setting. The study examined the interplay of communication, representation, interaction, and team process tools with behaviors that led to role clarity, shared understanding, and coordination. While each individual technology capability contributed to project execution and outcomes, much of the power of the environment emerged through the interplay of social behaviors and technology capabilities. The results have intriguing implications for how metaverse technology capabilities might provide new ways to address gaps in the current research and practice of virtual project management and virtual teams.

We investigate the linear and interactive influences of leader-empowering behaviors, team experience, and the degree of virtuality on team planning processes and performance among virtual sales teams. Collecting data across three separate time periods with 218 pharmaceutical sales teams, our results indicate that empowering leadership improves team planning processes and is moderated by the team's experience. Interestingly, it seems that, as teams gain more experience, they are less likely to engage in effective planning; however, these effects are attenuated as the team becomes more virtual in nature. Our findings have relevance for sales managers and salespeople in terms of leveraging team processes to influence performance as well as in terms of presenting the issues associated with virtual means of interaction.

This qualitative study captures the development of conflicts and emotions in virtual teams (VTs) and identifies strategies for preventing escalation of affective conflict to enhance VT performance. Participants were 45 university students organized into eight VTs for a class project. All communication regarding the project was virtual, and the primary data for the study consisted of the verbatim transcripts of 100% of the VT communications. Thematic analysis not only revealed the triggers of conflicts and its associated emotionality in a virtual environment but also the use of emotional regulation and feedback seeking behaviors to manage conflict and negative emotions. Integrating insights from this research with affective events theory, emotional regulation theory and theories of workplace conflict, we create a model for future research regarding the management of emotional reactions to conflict in virtual teams. Crown

Facing a fierce worldwide competition in the high tech era, companies are adopting virtual teams as a strategic tool to improve coordination efficiency and to expand organizational knowledge. As the organization knowledge becomes a more important resources than the traditional labor and capital in the new information economy, businesses today advocate knowledge management as a competitive necessity. Among various knowledge

The research explores factors influencing knowledge value creation of virtual teams in the construction industry. Collectiveness and conscientiousness emerge as important socio-cultural enablers for value creation. Collectiveness represents the degree of cohesiveness and social relationships between virtual team members and conscientiousness represents an awareness of the situation and avoidance of uncertainty and risk by team members. Moreover, technology assets, human networks, social capital, intellectual capital, and change management are identified as essential ingredients that have the potential to ensure effective knowledge value creation.

This paper presents the results of an investigation of differences between global, virtual and colocated new product development (NPD) teams. Specifically, we examined whether and how these three types of teams differed in terms of usage, challenges, and performance.

India, along with some of the other middle low income countries like Brazil, Russia, China and the Republic of Korea is competing with high income developed nations like USA and Japan in the knowledge sector. India has to its advantage a big pool of knowledge workers like scientists, engineers, and researchers available at low cost which. The pertinent question is whether the°ow of knowledge has resulted in inclusive growth. This research paper is a critical analysis of the challenges and opportunities on the pathway to India's journey towards becoming a global leader in knowledge economy with respect to the four pillars as de¯ned by the Knowledge Assessment Model (KAM) of the World Bank, namely, economic and institutional regime, education, information and communication technology, and innovation.

This qualitative study captures the development of conflicts and emotions in virtual teams (VTs) and identifies strategies for preventing escalation of affective conflict to enhance VT performance. Participants were 45 university students organized into eight VTs for a class project. All communication regarding the project was virtual, and the primary data for the study consisted of the verbatim transcripts of 100% of the VT communications. Thematic analysis not only revealed the triggers of conflicts and its associated emotionality in a virtual environment but also the use of emotional regulation and feedback seeking behaviors to manage conflict and negative emotions. Integrating insights from this research with affective events theory, emotional regulation theory and theories of workplace conflict, we create a model for future research regarding the management of emotional reactions to conflict in virtual teams. Crown

Previous studies have identified the difficulty of communicating in virtual teams. The lack of media richness, or opportunity for using non-verbal cues, leads to misunderstood communications and may limit the development of trust. Studies have also shown that males and females are socialized to communicate differently. Males use communication in teams to establish dominance and position while females use it to establish relationships and gain trust. In this study, we analyzed whether the gender of individual team members or the gender composition of the team impacted trust and satisfaction in short-duration virtual teams. Expectedly, females reported higher trust than males. However, team gender composition did not impact trust or satisfaction. The findings also indicate that males had less ability to dominate team interaction and that asynchronous computer mediated communication could equalize interactions among male and female team members.

We uncover new insights on the role of virtuality on team information sharing. A new two-dimensional conceptualization of information sharing ) enabled us to reconcile past inconsistencies in the virtual team literature. Recasting the findings of 94 studies (total number of groups = 5596; total N approximately = 19,702) into this framework reveals three key insights. First, virtuality improves the sharing of unique information, but hinders the openness of information sharing. Second, unique information sharing is more important to the performance of face-to-face teams than is open information sharing, whereas open information sharing is more important to the performance of virtual teams than is unique information sharing. Third, the effects of virtuality on information sharing are more curvilinear than linear -such that low levels of virtuality improve information sharing, but high levels hider it. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Global projects using new computing and communication technologies for at-distance communication and coordination are increasingly popular. As a result, team members are often located geographically and temporally apart, while working towards a common project goal. This paper takes a micro-level look at those actively involved in distributed team working. For the first time within the project team context, this paper uses the locus of control (LOC) construct to examine the influence of individual workers' general control expectancies on their attitudes towards distributed working. Decisions and actions of management and team colleagues are perceived and interpreted by team individuals as either enabling or constraining their own performance. This in turn, can affect their behaviour towards others. With its basis in reinforcement or learning theory, LOC offers a robust theoretical framework to research the virtual project team and inform business practice.

Recent studies on virtual teams reveal that team virtuality varies in a continuum and may take different levels. Different levels of virtuality have considerable impacts on team processes and management as they imply several characteristics concerning communication dynamics and interaction styles, which change when shifting from one level to another. The purpose of this paper is to assess how the

Organizations are encountering novel external environments requiring flexible structures. A number of organizations have used virtual teams to provide the customer responsiveness, human resource flexibility, and speed in project completion these environments demand. Virtual teams create significant communication challenges for its leaders and members. This research analyzed the communication technologies that the Customer Support Virtual Team (CST) of International Consulting Systems (ICS), the pseudonym for a Fortune 500 organization, uses to support team interaction, the degree to which ICS systems and culture supported CST, and finally, the CST members' mindset toward communication and the methods its leader used to create the trust required for effective team interaction.