The Importance Of 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

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 the team members communicate. Instead of using the full spectrum and dynamics of in-office face-to-face exchange, they now rely on special communication channels enabled by modern technologies, such as e-mails, faxes, phone calls and teleconferences, virtual meetings, and alike. Due to more limited communication channels, the success and effectiveness of virtual teams is much more sensitive to the type of project the group works on, what people are selected, and how the team is managed. Not every type of project is suitable for a virtual organization. One challenging case is projects that rely heavily on sequential or integrated work, as often the case in manufacturing. In particular, when each person’s work depends much on what someone else is doing at the same moment (like in a sports team), there is an ongoing heavy exchange of information in real time, and/or the tasks has to go through a strict sequence of workers within a short time. Not everyone can perform well in a virtual team environment. The members should be self motivated and able to work independently. They need to be able to keep working effectively without much of external control or structure. The next important quality is strong result-orientation. Unless the person shows clear results, there is nobody around to see how intense