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)

Blog Introduction

The emergence of Virtual Teams can be traced as far back as the 1970’s. 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). In the words of Melymuka (1997), “they (virtual teams) address the needs of a new work environment that has become increasingly common…”
I have been part of 2 virtual teams in my career and it is my observation that there is not standard methodology to manage a virtual team. In both the teams that I belonged to, the teams were “managed” differently. Although there is no shortage of books on project management a majority of these do not address the challenges that come with virtual project management. In my view when it comes to the management this type of team/project, each manager just does what seems right i.e. no formal methodology was followed.

Virtual Teams are here to stay, and for organisations to get the full benefit of such a team, academia should contribute to its success by continuing to research areas of importance. This is what I will attempt to do.

In this blog I will be learning about:

- The history of virtual teams
- Project Management of virtual teams
- Team development in a virtual team
- How to motivate (or inspire) virtual teams
- The psychological impacts of belonging to a virtual team
- Technology required to make virtual teams successful
- Virtual team building – can it be done?

This post references the following authors:
* Matthews J & Gladstone B. 2000. Extending the Group: A strategy for virtual team formation. Industrial and Commercial Training.
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