The Making or Breaking of a Virtual Team

For a virtual team to be successful the systems and structures in the organisation must be friendly towards it. Furthermore the infrastructural requirements which provide financial and operational incentives should be established (Rad & Levin, 2003)

The systems which need to be established up-front include:
- Team Member Selection,
- Training,
- Rewards Systems,
- Performance Evaluation,
- Establishing ROI metrics.

The structure in a virtual team should have enough discipline to get the project completed with minimal red-tape (Flannes and Levin, 2001).

A virtual team structure should promote the following:
- Task accomplishment;
- Sharing and Processing of Information;
- Leadership;
- Establishment of Social Relationships

Virtual teams are possible only because of recent advances in computer and telecommunications technology. These technologies define the operational environment of the virtual team and thus come together to form the infrastructure of virtual teamwork. (Townsend, DeMarie & Hendrickson, 1998).

There are three categories in which these technologies can be classified, i.e.
- Desktop Video Conferencing Systems - the core system around which the rest of virtual team technologies are built
- Collaborative Software Systems - collaborative software is designed to augment both types of group work activity and to empower teamwork processes
- Internet/Intranet systems - provide an important communicative and informational resource. They allow virtual teams to archive text, visual, audio, and numerical data in a user friendly format.

These three technologies provide an infrastructure, across which the virtual team will interact and provide technological empowerment to the virtual teams' operation (Osterlund, 1997).

It has been interesting learning about the systems, structure and infrastructure requirements of virtual teams. In my opinion the three are interdependant i.e. infrastructure enables the systems and structure which will make or break the virtual team. For organisations to be successful in the implementation of such teams, in my view, this is the information they should give the most attention to.

This post references the following authors:
· Gibson, C.B., & Cohen S.G. 2003. Virtual teams that work: creating conditions for virtual team effectiveness. Jossey.Bass
· Townsend A., DeMarie S.M., Hendrickson A.R. 1998. Virtual Teams: Technology and Workplace of the Future. Academy of Management Executive. Vol 12. No 3
· Rad, P. & Levin, G. 2003. Achieving Project Management Success using Virtual Teams. Florida. J.Ross Publishing.Osterlund, J. 1997. Competence management by informatics in R&D: The corporate level. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol 44 No 2