Virtual Teams

Carolyn Axtell & Steven Fleck

A virtual team is a group of individuals who work interdependently, are located at a distance from each other, and conduct most of their collaboration through communications technology (rather than face-to-face). A “pure” virtual team is one in which each member is geographically distant from each other member, but more often, at least some of the members are likely to be colocated. As organizations become more global and outsource more of their work, and as trends such as hot desking and telecommuting become popular in some professions, more and more business is being conducted across geographic distance. In many organizations today, it is not possible to locate everyone at the same site. This fact, in combination with the recent proliferation and improvement of communications technology, means that the use of virtual teams is likely to become more common. Despite the dispersion of team members in virtual teams, organizations want to ...

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