Critical Success Factors for Virtual Teams
February 12, 2025
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Most of the discussion about the virtual teams is centered around 100% virtual teams i.e. pure virtual team. Earlier only the extent of geographical distribution of team was used to determine the virtuality of teams. But now more and more research is being conducted to look at other dimensions which affect the level of virtuality.
If we look at the present workplace scenario, there is rarely any team which fits the definition of a pure co-located team or that of a pure virtual team.
Virtuality is a continuum in which the pure co-located team and pure virtual team represents the two extremes. Most of the current teams fall in between these two extremes.
For example videoconferencing enables members to see each other and it gives a feeling of a boardroom meeting thus it involves a low level of virtuality whereas email enables members to only share written information thus it involves high level of virtuality. So the richer the communication media, the lower is the level of virtuality.
If the members are engaged in real-time exchange of information as with videoconferencing or instant messaging, it is as good as face-to-face interactions, thus the level of virtuality is low. While in case of asynchronous information exchange, there is interruption in interactions, this result in higher level of virtuality.
In addition to the above three there are other factors such as number and location of work sites as well as the types of culture and languages of virtual team members.
Thus we see that virtuality of a team is largely interplay of these three dimensions. Various combinations of these three dimensions results in the different levels of virtuality on the continuum. A highly virtual team is one in which members are located in opposite time zones, hence they use only emails for communication plus there is a time lag between each response, then such a team has high level of virtuality. The members of this team never get to understand the personality, body language and non-verbal cues of each other. Based on our understanding of the level of virtuality, we can customize and deploy the essential strategies to build an effective virtual team.
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