This paper explores the challenges of creating and maintaining trust in a global virtual team whose members transcend time, space, and culture. The challenges are highlighted by integrating recent literature on work teams, computer-mediated communication groups, cross-cultural communication, and interpersonal and organizational trust. To explore these challenges empirically, we report on a seri...

This study describes the community building process of virtual learning teams as they form, establish roles and group norms, and address conflict. Students enrolled in an HRD masters program taught entirely online were studied to determine (1) how virtual learning teams develop their group process, and (2) what process and strategies they use as they work through the stages of group development...

Outsourcing is changing the decision-making environment. Tasks are becoming distributed and geographically dispersed. Groups must make decisions in a virtual environment. Virtual group collaboration efforts are quite different than face-to-face groups. Virtual group dynamics can be simulated from virtual groups used in web-based education (WBE). Both environments have many common elements. Expe...

In this paper, advantages and drawbacks of virtual teams in research and development (R&D) are studied. With the globalization of commercial practices and advances in information and communication technologies, increasing numbers of enterprises are establishing cross-functional, geographically distributed virtual teams. Virtual teams in R&D are designed to access external resources and knowledg...

With the rapid development and extensive application of information technologies, use of virtual teams to encourage collaboration with students from other campuses is receiving increasing attention from educators. Prior research has demonstrated that it is difficult for the virtual team to achieve the same performance as the traditional face-to-face team. We wanted to study whether the use of a...

Work groups are of critical importance to organizational effectiveness. Whether group members can function together cohesively affects the performance of a team. Therefore, the relationship between group cohesion and performance has been the focus of many studies. With advances in information technology, virtual teams have been employed in firms for a variety of tasks. Compared to face-to-face ...

It is crucial to effectively identify and leverage organizational team member knowledge. As virtual teams are becoming increasingly common in global companies, knowledge sharing in virtual teams is gaining attention among practitioners and scholars. In particular, the role of trust in effective knowledge sharing has been emphasized among scholars. However, there have been few attempts to integr...

In this paper we investigate collaboration within global virtual project teams. Our objective is to understand the practice of virtual teams to determine conditions needed in order to integrate groupware in such a context. The research question explored is: What are the conditions for integrating groupware technology in collaborative practice within virtual teams? Investigating this question we...