Enhancing Effectiveness on Virtual Teams: Understanding Why Traditional Team Skills Are Insufficient

Virtual team interactions are almost always assisted by some form of computer-mediated communica-tion technology. Computer-mediated communication is different in many ways from traditional face-to-face communication, perhaps most significantly because the communication is usually asynchronous instead of synchronous. Temporal independence of communication changes the patterns of work, decision making, and understandings about the work and the relationships between the individuals involved in the work. As a consequence, managing virtual teams is different and more complex than managing face-to-face teams, yet virtual teams are still groups of individuals that share most of the characteristics and dynamics found on traditional teams. The effective management of virtual teams requires knowledge and understanding of the fundamental principles of team dynamics regardless of the time, space, and communication differences between virtual and face-to-face work environments.