What's the history of virtual teams

Virtual teams are defined as groups that work "across space, time and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies." (Linpack & Stamps, 1997).
Nunamaker, Reinig & Briggs (2009) define virtual teams as:
- Multiple Organizations
- Multiple Locations
- Multiple Teams
- Multiple Time Zones
- Multiple Cultures

When we talk about virtual teams, we automatically think about IT projects, however virtual teams exist in other types of organisations such as the military and government. If you think about it, military organisations are the oldest organisations to operate virtually, with minimum technology…telephones at the time. The emergence of virtual teams in organisations stems from globalisation as well as the development of information technology. In 2004, it was estimated that 8.4 million employees in the US alone are members of one or more virtual teams. It had also been estimated that by 2005 20% of the world’s workers would be working virtually. In 2009 an organisation in the banking industry in South Africa has a presence in 49 countries across the world, the success of this organisation in all these countries will be through collaboration of the workers in the different countries.

This shows that virtual teams are here to stay and organisations which want to stay competitive in the global village should adapt to this type of working structure.

In my next post i will discuss the management or leadership of this type of team. Is it really that different from the traditional face to face team?

This post references the following authors:
Managing the Life cycle of Virtual Teams
Lipnack, J. & Stamps, J. 1997. Virtual teams reaching across space, time and organizations with technology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Nunamaker, JF., Reinig, AB & Briggs, RO. 2009. Principles for effective virtual teams. Communications of the ACM. Vol 52(4)