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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.
The nature of work in today's organizations is changing. In recent years, corporate activity has become increasingly more global, competition from both foreign and domestic sources has grown dramatically, and there has been a continued shift from production to service/knowledge-based work environments (Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1998). In addition, advances in information and communication technology have enabled a faster pace of change than in the past and have created jobs that are increasingly more complex and dynamic. In response to these changes, organizational systems, structures, and processes have evolved to become more flexible and adaptive. Horizontal organizational structures and team-based work units have become increasingly more prevalent and, with advances in technology, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, "virtual" teams as organizing units of work.
Townsend and colleagues (1998, p. 17) defined virtual teams as "groups of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed coworkers that are assembled using a combination of telecommunications and information technologies to accomplish an organizational task." In fact, these teams are used to accomplish a variety of critical tasks. PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has 45,000 employees in 120 countries, uses virtual teams to bring employees from around the globe "together" for a week or two to prepare work for a particular client. Whirlpool Corporation used a virtual team composed of experts from the United States, Brazil, and Italy during a...