Support for Communication-Based Work Processes in Virtual Work

Distributed work teams are increasingly being implemented to enhance organizational flexibility and competitiveness in today's complex and rapidly changing work environment. Though an increasing number of employees work cooperatively with individuals in a variety of different locations and types of virtual work environments, there is little investigation of the performance of communication-based work processes and their effect on team performance in these distributed environments. The objective of this research is to investigate the various communication-enabled work processes necessary in different distributed work teams, and the ways in which different types of communication modes can be used most effectively to support these processes. Our study takes into consideration individuals' multiple and often overlapping memberships in different team structures. In this paper we report initial findings from the research, which was conducted through interviews in two sales divisions of service units of two major companies in the information technology industry.