Background of the study:
Virtual teams are teams of people who primarily interact electronically and who may meet face-to-face occasionally.
Examples of virtual teams include a team of people working at different geographic sites and a project team whose members telecommute.
What is a virtual team? There are several different definitions of virtual teams, but what these definitions have in common is that, in addition to being a team, virtual team members are physically separated (by time and / or space) and that virtual team members primarily interact electronically. This researcher defines virtual teams as teams of people who primarily interact electronically and who may meet face-to-face occasionally.
{text:bookmark-start} Reasons {text:bookmark-end} for Virtual Teams
Reasons for virtual teams center around the differences in time and space for team members.
Team members may not be physically collocated.
It may not be practical to travel to meet face-to-face.
Team members may work different shifts
Specifically, teams may be distributed because of the new realities facing organizations such as:
organization-wide projects or initiatives
alliances with different organizations, some of which may be in other countries
mergers and acquisitions
emerging markets in different geographic locations
the desire of many people and government organizations for telecommuting
the continuing need for business travel and information and communications technologies available to support this travel
a need to reduce costs
a need to reduce time-to-market or cycle time in general (the increasing velocity in business)
{text:bookmark-start} Types of Groups {text:bookmark-end}
Four basic types of groups of people exist:
Task groups
Friendship groups
Command groups
Interest groups
These groups...