The development of information systems is a difficult process that often ends in failing to meet the project’s initial goals. Typical outcomes for information systems development projects include delivering promised products & services on time and within budget. These pressures are now compounded by the use of virtual teams that present a new set of challenges related to the cohesion, organizat...

Virtual organisations within and across enterprise structures are becoming mature as a potentially effective means for goal oriented business teamwork. Among the plentyful of support functions enabling the efficient cooperation in teams, team decision making is a very crucial one, but does not find adequate support in contemporary team software solutions. Even the most knowledgable results from...

In this chapter, we adopt a sociotechnical systems approach to understand the challenges faced by members of an organizational unit that is not constrained by geographical, temporal, organizational, or national boundaries. Specifically, we examine virtual team performance within the context of an open sociotechnical system, highlighting the effects that the technological subsystem (e.g., collab...

In today’s increasingly globalised world, the need for work teams to span temporal and geographic boundaries is growing. These virtual teams allow many of the limitations of standard co-located teams to be side-stepped, while at the same time offering many improvements, such as access to a wider skill base and a more culturally diverse team membership. While these improvements can be significan...

The use of teams, especially virtual teams, is growing significantly in corporations, branches of the government and nonprofit organizations. However, despite this prevalence, little is understood in terms of how to best train these teams for optimal performance. Team training is commonly cited as a factor for increasing team performance, yet, team training is often applied in a haphazard and b...

Virtual teams formed across organisational boundaries and organised around an opportunity are a relatively new area of research. The purpose of forming such teams is new ‘knowledge creation’. The focus of this paper, therefore, is on the processes of collective ‘knowing’ resulting in novel combinations of products and services. The paper presents the preliminary results of a qualitative researc...

Increased globalization of enterprises combined with widespread adoption of simple, low cost, asynchronous e-collaboration technologies (e.g., bulletin board, e-mail) provides incentive to attempt increasingly complex problem solving with virtual teams. If complex business process improvement activities could be conducted using asynchronous e-collaboration, the potential to reduce competition f...

Advancements in information technologies (IT) have enabled the ability to exchange knowledge within and across organizations through virtual teams. However, the ability to effectively communicate and share knowledge in virtual settings can become a difficult task due to the complex nature of both the virtual context and the technology used to support them. This paper argues that transactive mem...

Virtual teams are becoming a preferred mechanism for harnessing, integrating and applying knowledge that is distributed across organizations and in pockets of collaborative networks. In this paper, we recognize that knowledge application, among the three phases of knowledge management, has received little research attention. Paradoxically, this knowledge application phase contributes most to va...

A research project with distributed electronic teams was conducted to examine how virtual temporary teams quickly develop and maintain trust relationships with people that they hardly know, and may never meet again, with the goal of producing interdependent work. We collected data from 14 teams of students from three different universities with the aim of providing a theoretical and empirical e...