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Mastering Virtual Teams
By Deborah L. Duarte and Nancy Tennant Snyder. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999. 229 pages, hardcover, $28.95
Teams today have the technological capability to work across time and distance. These virtual teams face many challenges. Working across distances may involve significant time zone differences, while working across national boundaries may involve differences in language, culture, and access to technology. According to Deborah L. Duarte and Nancy Tennant Snyder, "people who lead and work in virtual teams need to have special skills, including an understanding of human dynamics, knowledge of how to manage across functional areas and national cultures, and the ability to use communication technologies as their primary means of communicating and collaborating." To that end, Mastering Virtual Teams provides tools, techniques, and strategies for the increasing number of people who will work in or lead virtual teams.
The authors identify synchronous technologies, which enable team members to interact at the same time. These include desktop and real-time conferencing, electronic meeting systems, electronic display, video conferencing, and audio conferencing. Asynchronous technologies, which facilitate delayed interaction, include E-mail, group calendars and schedules, bulletin boards and web pages, non-real-time database sharing and conferencing, and workflow applications.
Each technology is rated on its appropriateness for four types of team tasks: generating ideas and plans about the team's work; solving routine problems where answers already exist; solving ambiguous or complex problems where routine answers may not exist;...