Virtual teams have been used to leverage scarce and distributed resources for many years. Expense reductions, health epidemics, air travel safety, and complex supply chains have only intensified this need. General best practices for leading and participating in virtual teams are well known but why are there still misconceptions about their effectiveness? What drives the notion that ?face to face is always better?? How can groups and individuals take the most advantage of virtual teams through the appropriate use of technology? Working Virtually: Challenges of Virtual Teams provides an in-depth, practical perspective on the growing dependence of virtual teams and how to best exploit them. Based on years of direct experience in managing and participating in virtual teams, as well as developing solutions to help virtual teams be more effective, the authors have provided unique insight that can be leveraged to help you get the most of your virtual teams.

"This set of books represents a detailed compendium of authoritative, research-based entries that define the contemporary state of knowledge on technology"--Provided by publisher.

The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams is an essential resource for leaders, virtual team members, and work group leaders. The editors provide a proved framework based on five principles for working collaboratively across boundaries of time, space, and culture. Written by experts in the field, the contributors offer practical suggestions and tools for virtual team who need to assess their current level of effectiveness and develop strategies for improvement. This important resource also contains an array of illustrative cases as well as practical tools for designing, implementing, and maintaining effective virtual work.

Virtual Teams That Work offers a much-needed, comprehensive guidebook for business leaders and managers who want to create the organizational conditions that will help virtual teams thrive. Each chapter in this important book focuses on best practices and includes case studies and illustrative examples from a wide variety of companies, including British Petroleum, Lucent Technologies, Ramtech, SoftCo, and Whirlpool Corporation. These real-life examples demonstrate how the principles identified in the book play out within virtual teams. Virtual Teams That Work shows how organizations can put in place the structure to help team members who speak different languages and have different cultural values develop effective ways of communicating when there is little opportunity for the members to meet face-to-face. The authors also reveal how organizations can implement performance management and reward systems that will motivate team members to cooperate across multiple boundaries. And they offer the information to determine which technologies best fit a variety of virtual-team tasks and the level of information technology support needed.

Virtual teams are a relatively new phenomenon and by definition work across time, distance, and organizations through the use of information and communications technology. Virtual Teams: Projects, Protocols and Processes gathers the best of academic research on real work-based virtual teams into one book. It offers a series of chapters featuring practical research, insight and recommendations on how virtual team projects can be better managed, as well as in depth discussion on issues critical to virtual team success, including the place of virtual teams in organizations, leadership, trust and relationship building, best use of technology, and knowledge sharing.

In recent years, virtual teams have become a feature of most corporate workplaces, yet few academic programs prepare students to work in virtual teams, and few textbooks support the development of key skills for virtual teamwork. The primary purpose of this book is to enable higher education students to participate in virtual teams with students from other institutions, who potentially operate in different countries, time zones, and/or cultures. The book guides students through the process of working in virtual team projects for their classes, and helps them to engage with the learning experiences, and to respond to potential challenges. The book is directed towards students within any of the following disciplines: Business; Information Technology; Communication Studies; and Engineering. One section of the book also guides teachers through the process of organizing virtual team projects, and explores the teacher/teacher collaboration that is an inevitable consequence of organizing inter-institutional student virtual team projects. It provides advice for teachers on how to manage administrative challenges such as conflicting institutional schedules and grading mechanisms. In addition, it discusses research themes and data gathering and analysis techniques for teachers who wish to publish findings about the virtual team process and outcomes. As well as students and teachers, the book is also useful for researchers exploring any of the following themes: Technology use in virtual teams; Communication strategies and international communication in virtual teams; Communities of learning, e-learning, and virtual teams; Challenges of virtual teamwork; Planning a virtual team collaboration project; and Gathering and analyzing data about virtual collaboration.

Over the past 10 years in the field of human and organizational development, the approach to team building has moved from problem solving and conflict management to helping work groups and organizations build a foundation of trust, cooperation, and mutual support. Focusing on collaboration rather than resolving conflict, Building Better Teams: 70 Tools and Techniques for Strengthening Performance Within and Across Teams offers a fresh approach to team building. It provides proven tools for the most common needs of teams, including establishing trust, building consensus, managing change, working virtually and across boundaries, and dealing with setbacks.

Virtual teams can be traced back to the 1990s with the debauched development of communication technologies as well as the fast extension of the internet. Virtual teams possess unique features allowing them to combine cultural multiplicity, specific tasks, physical remoteness of team members, continuous distant communication, critical interdependence of tasks, leadership, cohesion, empowerment, confidence, virtuality, special trust creation and trust building. For a successful functioning of present-day organisations, they need to employ geographically dispersed labour force. Creating virtual teams functioning across national borders, organisations secure the most competent talent available world-wide. Employing the best available know-how, virtual teams apply the knowledge of experts from various cultures having diverse capabilities as well as varied perceptions on dealing with multiple organisational challenges from strategic perspectives. Compositions of virtual teams operating across national borders alter depending on types of industry, organisation, and organisational unit. International virtual teams functioning across national borders perform from practically everywhere all over the world if there is a secure and constant internet connection. This book is dedicated to offering a comprehensive outlook and analysis of the theoretical and practical aspects related to the creation of virtual teams across national borders as well as the specifics of their implementation. The research, published as chapters in the book, allow the detection of the key aspects and trends concerning the creation and performance of virtual teams across national borders. The book presents topics, not being investigated in-depth so far or not researched at all. The purpose of the book is to fill in certain gaps in the existing research and subsequent publications, referring to a broad variety of issues concerning theoretical and empirical fundamentals of the creation of virtual teams and their functioning across national borders, the role of virtual intelligence in relation to distance interpretation in international virtual teams, geography of virtual teams in relation to digital nomads, communication in virtual teams, creation of communal identity via implementation of virtual teams, tax implications for virtual work among numerous other issues.

Addresses a range of e-collaboration topics, with emphasis on virtual team leadership and collaborative engineering. Presents a blend of conceptual, theoretical, and applied chapters.

Analyzes key critical HR variables and defines previously undiscovered issues in the HR field.