Introduction
Global virtual teams:
what impacts their
design and
performance?
Krishna Prasad and
K.B. Akhilesh
The authors
Krishna Prasad is Technical Member, Corporate
EBusiness, DaimlerChrysler AG. Stuttgart, Germany.
K.B. Akhilesh is a Professor, Department of Management
Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
Keywords
Virtual organizations, Teamwork, Teams, Work design,
Strategic management, Globalization
Abstract
This paper examines the aspect of designing global virtual
teams and the key factors that impact team design.
Examines how design impacts team performance.
Proposes a conceptual model for designing such teams to
deliver optimal performance. The model contains four
major elements: virtual team structure, strategic
objectives, work characteristics and situational
constraints. The impact of the last three elements on team
structure and their relationship to team performance are
examined. Proposes a multi-dimensional measure for
virtual team structure, and considers how situational
demands and performance constraints can impact team
design. Highlights the fact that performance of teams too
is multi-dimensional and design has to consider the
tradeoff involved in these factors. Proposes that global
virtual teams be designed with a holistic approach
considering an optimal fit between the team structure and
the key impacting factors like objectives, work
characteristics and situational constraints to deliver
performance.
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Team Performance Management: An International Journal
Volume 8 . Number 5/6 . 2002 . pp. 102±112
# MCB UP Limited . ISSN 1352-7592
DOI 10.1108/13527590210442212
In today’s business and organizational
context, it is not rare to see a project team
whose team members are no longer sitting
together in close physical proximity, yet who
are working like they were in a traditional
team. It may not be surprising even if they are
sitting in different parts of the globe and are
not belonging to the same organization.
Cairncross, a noted writer for The Economist,
in one of her books has written about how the
improvements in communication
technologies and convergence of several
broadband technologies have had a dramatic
impact on businesses and how people have
started working together, even from distances.
She argues as to how this has led to what she
calls as ‘‘death of distance’’ (Cairncross,
1997). Is it just the death of distance? We feel
it is death of location, death of organizational
boundaries, death of time zones which has
subsequently led to the birth of radical forms
of organizational designs. It is revolutionary in
some sense where these apparent barriers that
existed in the older economy are overcome
and people within organizations are finding
new ways to work together.
It no longer matters to Microsoft if some of
its product designers are sitting in one part of
the USA, its product development engineers
in a different part and product test engineers
in some other part of the world, for example
China or India. Texas Instruments has offices
spread across the world (including the USA
and India) and interestingly, some of the
teams, irrespective of their location, use the
same computing infrastructure like servers
and development tools. With the time
differences of as high as 12 hours in some
cases, when one team is probably leaving
office for home, the other teams are just
coming in, thus leading to high resource
utilization. Similar is the case with Motorola,
where the multiple teams are working
together from different parts of the globe on a
single product. Organizations are excited by
the fact that they no longer need to co-locate
big teams. Microsoft, Texas Instruments and
Motorola are just examples. Looking around,
it is not difficult to see a majority of the
multi-national organizations operating such
teams with product design, development, test
centers distributed around the globe, Philips,
Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, GE,
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DaimlerChrysler, Oracle and Digital
Equipment just to name a few.
We are seeing that increasingly
organizations are expanding their operations
globally, either through formation of
alliances, joint ventures or subsidiaries. The
pressure to go global has been enormous for
these companies, for several reasons like
access to markets, localization of products,
access to scientific talent and human
resources and exploitation of diverse
capabilities of people from across the globe.
Further, they have realized that organizational
and geographic boundaries no longer need to
prevent employees from working on complex
projects that give them a competitive edge.
If globalization as a business pull is one
reason for proliferation of such global teams,
the other significant reason is the technology
push. The advent of new communication
technologies, from as simple as e-mailing
from anywhere to anywhere using Internet
and Intranets, to more sophisticated audio
and video-conferencing, shared electronic
white-boards, group-ware has helped people
to overcome the barrier of distance and time
significantly (Anthony et al., 1998; George,
1996; Pape, 1996). The new wave of digital
technologies has given organizations an
enormous opportunity to bring together their
distributed workforce and develop the ability
to work together despite being apart. The
state-of-the-art information and digital
electronic communication technologies are at
the heart of the operating environment of
these teams. These teams rely very heavily on
them and have much less face-to-face
interaction. At times many conversations are
asynchronous (e-mailing) and only sometimes
are synchronous methods like audio/video
conferencing used. In the literature, these
teams are commonly referred to as virtual
teams.
What are the key differentiating aspects
between these teams and their traditional
counterparts? Can we formally define such
teams? Literature on virtual teams presents
fairly diverse viewpoints on this emerging
concept. There is no single consensus
definition and this to some extent indicates
the immaturity of the theoretical development
in this topic. The first striking aspect of these
teams is the unconventionality and their
transcending some of the known barriers that
existed in the traditional teams like time,
space, organizations and even national
borders (Wigand et al., 1997; Dembski, 1998;
Larsen, 1999). Also more likely is that these
teams are temporary in nature or at best
semi-permanent, put together to address a
specific organizational goal. They normally
operate on a project basis (Bultje and Wijk,
1998; Byrne et al., 1993). With regard to the
membership of such teams, researchers have
shared a view that these teams are generally
self-managed with distributed expertise of
complementary value and who bring in
different core-competencies. Also, as already
mentioned earlier, since in many cases the
teams transcended national borders, it is also
natural to see the cultural diversity in team
membership. It should be added that cultural
diversity includes regional, national cultures,
and even organizational cultures (Jarvenpaa
and Shaw, 1998; Dess et al., 1995; Jansen et
al., 1997; Carmel, 1999).
Summarizing from the above discussion, a
global virtual team could be defined as a team
with distributed expertise and that spans
across boundaries of time, geography,
nationality and culture. They address a
specific organizational goal with enhanced
performance and operate with very little
face-to-face interaction and predominantly
computer mediated and electronic
communication. We use this as a reference
definition for our discussions in this paper.
Research question
We propose to address the following research
questions in this paper. What are the factors
that have a big impact on global virtual team
design? How does team design affect
performance? How do they all fit together into
a common framework?
There is a feeling within organizations that
virtual teams do not need any special
attention. Many within the management of
these organizations have perceptions that the
added complexity of collaboration using
technologies to overcome distance, time and
locations is greatly exaggerated. Complexities
typically arise from several issues and the lack
of opportunities for the team to address these
issues because of their nature, contrary to
traditional teams. For example, each virtual
team member brings with him his own habits
and way of working. The rest of the team get
very few opportunities (or probably no
opportunities) to know these well. Virtual
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teams provide little opportunities for informal
information exchange. This is one of the most
often heard concerns for virtual teams.
Co-located teams with people working in
close proximity have the big advantage of
informal communication and get-togethers,
like at coffee shops, meetings after office
hours, lunch tables etc. These informal
exchanges are most valuable and play a very
important role in bonding of relationships,
building cohesiveness and even trust. These
meetings also give a chance to empathize with
each other. Another concern would be the
need for the team members to adapt
themselves to the new communication
technologies as an increasing means of
working together. Adapting to typically
asynchronous communication mechanisms
like e-mail could pose problems to many.
Would a psychological distance arise due to
physical distance of the team members?
Our idea here is not to provide an
exhaustive list of concerns for a virtual team
setting. However it provides a motivation for
us to propose a strong view that a large
amount of effort is needed to put together a
virtual team in terms of its design, planning
and making it operational. In today’s business
world it is still largely underestimated. It is
not as simple as bringing together all the
people, like in a traditional team, to solve a
problem. It is not a simple re-creation of a
physical form into a digital form. With the
inherent nature of virtual teams being
heterogeneous in terms of location, cultures,
organizational membership, there is a high
probability that team members are confronted
with mistrust, unequal or unknown
expectations and different team dynamics.
Many of these concerns do exist in traditional
teams too but the virtual team setting
magnifies the same (Duarte and Snyder,
1999; George, 1996). Virtual teams have to
adapt to the virtual mode of work and to some
amount of inherent uncertainty. So how does
a management go about designing such
teams?
We propose a top-down approach for
designing global virtual teams and ahead of
everything they have to be viewed in the light
of implementation of the business strategies
(Dunphy and Bryant, 1996; Chiesa, 1996a, b;
Schilling and Hill, 1998). Virtual teams are
set up to achieve the stated objectives and
their structures and context have to support
these. Especially when the strategic objectives
are very diverse, these would impact the team
composition and team membership quite
dramatically. Organizations can focus on the
virtual team development efforts that are
aligned with the strategic objectives. This
would give the right focus to the team itself
for developing competencies that could give it
a short-term or long-term advantage. Global
virtual teams being a novel organizational
design, it is very important to maximize the fit
between team design and their stated intent.
Proper design of teams in itself would be of
no avail if it does not finally lead to delivery of
top performance. We believe that a right
design is just a means to achieve the end and
it is not an end in itself. The teams have to be
structured appropriately to achieve maximum
effectiveness. A great deal of research has
been done in the area of effectiveness of teams
and the critical factors that affect team
performance. Researchers have advanced a
number of theoretical explanations and
models to explain team performance. These
models typically include multiple categories
of predictors. Very different kinds of teams
have been studied that include
cross-functional teams, task forces,
self-managed teams and new product
development (Hackman, 1990; Shea and
Guzzo, 1987; Kur, 1996; Choudron, 1995;
Cohen et al. 1996; Larson and Gobeli, 1989).
Drawing from these different models, we
recognize that emphasis has been on team
characteristics and composition, team
processes, work characteristics and contextual
factors. This diverse set of factors gives us a
clear indication that any framework that
addresses global virtual team design has to be
multidimensional. We also are of the view
that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that
the ideas from these different models are also
applicable to virtual teams. However we have
adapted the above research findings to the
context of global virtual teams. We argue in a
later section (see next section) how the
elements of team characteristics, team
composition and team processes fit into the
definition of a virtual team structure.
Synthesizing from the discussion so far, we
are in a position to present the major
dimensions of the global virtual team
framework – strategic objectives, work
characteristics, situational constraints and the
team structure (see Figure 1). As already
mentioned earlier, it had to be a
multi-dimensional structure with several
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Figure 1 Global virtual team framework
inter-related and possibly competing
dimensions. Hence we would assume that
when there is a strong relationship between
these elements, there has to be an optimal fit
among all of them to deliver the right
performance.
We will now examine each of the elements
that make up our framework in more detail.
How do we characterize a virtual team
structure?
A significant amount of research has been
done on team structures and it has attracted
researchers from areas of organization design,
organizational theory, organizational
development and strategic management. A
generally accepted yet a simple definition of
structure is that it is an instrument to achieve
the objectives (Drucker, 1974). The most
visible and facilitating aspect of teams is their
structure. An appropriately designed team
provides a basis for performing the job in a
planned manner. There have been very
diverse ideas on describing team and
organizational structures and hence there has
been no precise definition or criteria to
differentiate teams in terms of their
structures. We will examine these different
methods and propose a comprehensive way of
describing a global virtual team structure.
A common way of understanding team
structure has been to examine its organization
chart. The chart would typically convey
information about people that are part of the
team, titles implying roles attached to them,
their relative positions and reporting
relationships implying hierarchy and the span
of control (Clark, 1972; Newman, 1973).
Organizational design literature in today’s
context suggests that team design go much
beyond an organization chart. It has to
address the contextual aspects, process
aspects and people aspects (Dunphy and
Bryant, 1996; Reimann, 1977).
We first examine the contextual aspects of
teams. The most important contextual
measure of a team would be the team
characteristics. As discussed earlier, the
characteristics of virtual teams reflect on the
extent to which they are different from
traditional co-located teams, which we call
degree of virtual-ness. This could be
measured by how geographically dispersed
the sub-teams are, extent of media-richness of
the communication technologies being used,
frequency of face-to-face meetings, extent of
diversity in cultures, shared history of working
together and the temporal nature of the team.
Then we look at team composition and
membership that adds to the virtual
characteristics of the team. Team members
belonging to different line functions or
organizations is one issue of interest and the
other is the diversity of skills and
competencies they bring to the team. Each of
the factors adds to the degree of virtual-ness
and the teams have to appropriately adapt to
this increasing virtual-ness.
From team processes points of view, we first
examine measures of decision making within
the team. On the one hand, teams could be
having a centralized decision-making process
and on the other a de-centralized process. In
the context of virtual teams we use this to
express whether the decision-making
authority rests with one sub-team or
appropriately delegated to other sub-teams
also. Along with this, there is the degree of
information sharing between the sub-teams
and degree of participation in long-range
planning (Reimann, 1977). Then we adapt
the work from Van de Ven et al. (1976) and
Slocum and Sims (1980) to examine the
modes of control and communication and
coordination mechanisms within the virtual
teams. On the one extreme we could have
systematized mode of control driven by set of
procedures and standards. The information
exchange would be systematized among the
sub-teams that could include technical
documentation, planning documentation and
various management reports. Coordination
is more formal with mechanisms like
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pre-planned meeting and conferencing dates,
defined workflow process with agreed
interface points in the process. In this mode,
very little self-regulation would be possible for
the sub-teams. A more moderate mode of
control is driven by guidelines rather than
stringent rules. There is a limited amount of
freedom in handling problems and allows
only a moderate variation in procedures or
methods during operations. The other
extreme would be where the mandate for the
team would be to achieve the overall goal
within a specified time and a set of norms and
expectations for member behavior and
interactions. We then address the issue of
commonality in the team processes among the
participating sub-teams. The degree of
commonality in work processes and
technology infrastructure would be of interest
and it could vary from team to team.
In the normal work life, there is also a big
scope for informal mechanisms like
discussions that takes place near
water-coolers, coffee corners and after-office
social evenings. During all these meetings, a
lot of work-related information that could
include variability in plans, processes,
informal agreements and assumptions, is
exchanged (Herbsleb and Grinter, 1999). All
these, in addition to enhancing alignment
within the team on critical issues, also help in
reinforcing the trust. There seems to be an
inherent conflict between the requirement of
a high degree of trust between people and the
temporary nature of their association with
very little social contact. Some have argued
that face-to-face interactions are most
important for building trust and relationships
and there is no alternative to that (Nonaka
and Takeuchi, 1995; McMahan, 1998). We
feel that teams can come up with some
innovative mechanisms to utilize the leadingedge communication technologies to possibly
create such opportunities. We call them
alternate mechanisms, alternate to the ones
that traditional teams could afford to have.
What these mechanisms could be would be an
interesting thing to examine.
We finally consider the attitudinal aspects
of team members. Team members often show
preferences for certain technologies and
certain meeting times. They also tend to
establish unwritten norms and practices. We
are of the view that this too is an essential
structural measure.
Summarizing from the above discussion we
propose the following dimensions for
measuring the virtual team structure (see
Figure 2).
Strategic intent
The most oft quoted advantage of virtual
teams is the ability for organizations to
leverage competencies and skills available, no
matter in which part of the world. These
teams are deemed to have the capability to
solve the most complex problems due to the
diversity in skills and competencies. By
forming virtual teams, companies can realize
the competitive synergies of teamwork and at
the same time exploit the advancements in
information and communication
technologies. They open up possibilities for
greater innovation because of more diverse
participation and stimulating product and
process creativity (Lipnack and Stamps,
1997). These teams provide an excellent
opportunity for especially businesses whose
products are predominantly digital in nature,
like software development, electronic media
publishing, Internet-based services and the
consulting industry, where a large amount of
pooling of resources and information is
needed.
The shift in the economies from production
orientation to knowledge and service
orientation has forced companies to look for
more flexible response mechanisms. This
flexibility has driven once highly structured
organizational forms (suited for production)
to more ad hoc forms. Virtual teams have been
able to provide this response with the
effectiveness of traditional teams and
dynamism of team membership and
structure. Organizations are realizing also that
Figure 2 Dimensions of team structure
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it is imperative to have suitable partners for
co-operation and collaboration and to be
responsive to increasing customer demands in
terms of quality of service and speed.
(Anthony et al., 1998).
Another significant advantage that is often
mentioned in business literature is that of
reduced costs. One of the major motivations
for globalization has been access to low-wage
resources and it has been very attractive in
labor intensive industry sectors since
significant cost reduction could be achieved
due to differential labor costs. For
multi-national organizations that are already
global in their operations, virtual teams offer a
great advantage of reduced travel costs and
time. They open up opportunities to create
better electronically enhanced processes and
still maintain their global character. They
provide a practical way to achieve enhanced
results, enable technology and knowledge
transfer and help speedier implementation of
solutions (George, 1996).
It is also becoming important to meet the
ever-growing expectations of the high
performing employees within organizations.
Employee participation in their workplaces is
undergoing a transformation with more and
more of these technologies becoming popular.
They no longer want to be constrained to the
four walls of their office space, but are
expecting to work from the comforts of their
home or any remote location. This may give
them more flexibility in terms of their
schedules and also avoid wastage of time due
to commuting (Anthony et al., 1998).
Summarizing, we have the following
dimensions of strategic objectives (see
Figure 3).
Work characteristics
There are diverse propositions to characterize
work in the literature. Work itself is generally
understood as the process used to transform
Figure 3 Dimensions of strategic objectives
inputs to outputs on a predictable basis. In
our paper we use the terms tasks, work and
jobs interchangeably. The role of work
characteristics in team design has been
researched for several years. The team
structures depend upon the work they
perform. There has been substantial empirical
support for this relationship (Grimes and
Klein, 1973; Reimann, 1977). There is a
definite correspondence between the work
complexity and variability and the operational
structures of the team. The work
characteristics itself is not a unitary
phenomenon. There are several measures to
work characteristics.
The most often used characteristic has been
the aspect of uncertainty. We examine two
kinds of uncertainty, one that reflects on the
task itself and the other on the process of
transformation (Galbraith, 1973; Slocum and
Sims, 1980). Task uncertainty is the degree to
which the sub-teams lack the knowledge or
the degree of specialization needed to
accomplish the task. The task uncertainty
directly reflects on the division of work and
management complexity in terms of ease of
control, ease of replacement of members and
training periods. The uncertainty in the
process of transformation is commonly
referred to as workflow uncertainty. The
process could involve several steps and the
dependencies among these steps could lead to
different kinds of uncertainty, like when, what
and where the inputs would arrive. These
dependencies and uncertainty would take
greater proportions when the work system’s
external environment is complex and
changing. This to a large extent affects also
the stability of work product. The
environment would affect the extent to which
the management could program the response
to uncertainties.
In addition to uncertainty we focus also on
the complexity and difficulty of work.
Complexity of work could stem from the lack
of appropriate inputs at the right time or
simply be due to the novelty of the attempted
technology. It could be a result of the number
of participants in technical decision making
due to the interfaces and dependencies.
Difficulty arises during work mostly due to
lack of the right skills to execute the job. It
also reflects on whether the job involved is
routine in nature and could be supported with
clear guidelines, or it is novel and possibly of a
problem-solving nature.
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What are the different contextual
constraints?
So we propose the following the measures
for work characteristics (see Figure 4).
Performance in virtual teams
There is a vast amount of literature that has
focussed on effectiveness and performance of
traditional teams and the other forms of
teams. Much of the work has been done in the
area of traditional performance measures
(Cohen et al., 1996; Choudron, 1995; Kline et
al., 1996). New ideas came in several other
directions like satisfaction, qualitative
measures, goals achievement, mission (Ford
and McLaughlin, 1992; Jiang et al., 1997;
Shea and Guzzo, 1987; Hovemeyer, 1993).
We adapt the work done in the domain of
traditional teams to virtual teams. These
performance measures address the aspects of
how well the team is managing cost control,
on-time delivery, product or service quality
and productivity.
Virtual teams have an enormous potential
for knowledge creation and dissemination.
We propose that a knowledge creation
performance measure should reflect on the
ability of the team to realize this potential to
reality. Knowledge measures are contribution
towards process improvement, learning,
innovation and value creation.
In today’s competitive environment,
internal team members’ aspirations and needs
assume an equal importance. So we think that
it is appropriate to measure the team
performance in terms of attitudinal aspects
too. We propose job satisfaction and
commitment also to be examined as a team
performance measure.
The summary on measures of performance
is presented in Figure 5.
Figure 4 Dimensions of work characteristics
Figure 5 Dimensions of performance
The traditional performance measures of
time, quality, cost and productivity were
discussed in the previous section. Project
management literature suggests that very
often teams have to work with the fact that
there is a great amount of interdependency
among these factors. Typically it has been
found that conditions enhancing one factor
could potentially depress some other factor.
So there is a performance tradeoff involved in
every team situation. How does management
plan for this tradeoff? How can this awareness
influence team design? We propose that the
virtual teams’ management have to work with
what we define as performance constraints.
These are purely situational demands and
could vary from team to team and from time
to time (Wong and Burton, 2000). The
constraints are essentially on the performance
expectations from virtual teams. We propose
that these constraints be defined in terms of
tolerance for variations in each of the
performance factors.
Cost variation and schedule variation is so
very common in today’s projects’ context;
some could argue that it is not a constraint at
all. However this plays a significant role in
many situations. Examples could be in cases
of fixed price contracts between client and a
supplier. Typically the project scope is
defined in the beginning and the budget is
fixed for the supplier. Cost escalation could
lead to huge financial losses for the supplier.
Schedule slippage is crucial in a very
competitive market where time-to-market is
the separator between gainers and losers. This
is a very commonplace occurrence in
consumer electronics markets. Variation in
quality could play a significant role in certain
kinds of project teams, especially working on
mission critical, safety critical and business
critical systems. Examples for these projects
could be of air traffic controller systems,
nuclear power station control systems,
weapons systems, flight control systems,
insurance and banking systems. In these
situations the tolerance for errors could be
very low. Coordination effort is one more
aspect that assumes great significance in
virtual teams, as we have discussed in our
earlier sections, as we argue that virtual team
management has to be aware of the increased
effort that would be necessary in terms of
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communication time and costs, mutual
monitoring and discussions and possibly more
formal processes. In this case we propose that
the elasticity of coordination effort would be
the constraint.
Summarizing, we have the measures for
contextual constraints (see Figure 6).
Proposed model and discussion
We are now in a position to present our
complete framework for global virtual teams
(see Figure 7). The model exhibits the team
structure impacted by strategic objectives,
work characteristics and contextual
constraints. We also summarize the
relationships between the various elements in
the framework. Three matrices (see Tables I,
II and III) have been presented to show the
potential impact on the dimensions of team
structure. We propose to further test these
relationships using empirical research by
studying operational global teams. However
we point out that the results from the studies
on traditional forms of teams seem to suggest
that there is a potential value in taking the
research further through empirical studies.
We have indicated only the high impact
relationships in the above matrices. The blank
cells either mean low impact or no impact at
all. Secondly, the tables only suggest the
magnitude of such a relationship. The
relationship could either be a direct
relationship or an inverse one. We wish to
arrive at more precise relationships after
empirical studies.
Figure 6 Measures of situational constraints
Conclusion
In this paper we have reviewed the
state-of-the-art research on the relatively new
organizational design phenomenon called
Figure 7 Global virtual team performance model
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Table I Relationship between global virtual team structure and strategic objectives
Cost savings
Leverage competencies
Flexibility in management
Employee needs and aspirations
Degree of
virtualness
Control and
coordination
High
High
High
High
High impact
High impact
High impact
impact
impact
impact
impact
Team
norms
Substitution
mechanisms
Table II Relationship between global virtual team structure and work characteristics
Uncertainty
Complexity and difficulty
Degree of
virtualness
Control and
coordination
Team
norms
Substitution
mechanisms
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
Table III Relationship between global virtual team structure and performance constraints
Degree of
virtualness
Tolerance
Tolerance
Tolerance
Tolerance
for
for
for
for
cost variance
schedule variance
errors
productivity
Control and
coordination
Team
norms
Substitution
mechanisms
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
High impact
global virtual teams. Then we have
synthesized from the research literature on
work groups and traditional teams,
organization design and business strategy to
suggest a model, a multi-dimensional
framework for global virtual teams. We are of
the view that this model is important in that it
suggests a holistic approach to designing
global virtual teams. It proposes that there be
a best fit between the team structure and its
determinants to deliver an optimal
performance. Virtual teams have to be aware
of this to move towards the optimal fit
situation. It recognizes that performance itself
is multi-dimensional and there is a tradeoff
between the different dimensions of
performance. It also suggests that under
situational demands, some of these demands
be actually planned as performance
constraints.
The proposed model with the set of
inter-relationships could be regarded as a
primary step towards theory building in the
area of global virtual teams, which is still in its
infancy. The model synthesizes ideas and
results from varied areas of research,
particularly groups and teams, organization
design, strategic management, research and
technology management and team
performance. In terms of specific contribution
in this area, from our point of view, are the
suggested dimensions for measuring and
High impact
High impact
High impact
characterizing team structure particularly
applicable to global virtual teams. It reiterates
the point that structure is much more than
organizational charts and reporting
relationships, as has been looked at in former
research studies and provides a more holistic
view of team structure. Within team
structure, the recognition of the importance
of alternate mechanisms that are unique to
virtual teams presents a new perspective that
has not been advanced before. Then the
proposition that management has to define
the situational constraints in advance and how
these influence the virtual team structure is
another important contribution.
We have the following challenges to
overcome in our next steps. The most
important one is being able to come up with
measures and reliable measurement
instruments for each of the dimensions within
our model. These measures could help us in
grounding the model with empirical data. In
the first phase, we would be focussing on
certain industry domains with predominantly
digital products and later it would be
interesting to see the applicability to a more
general virtual team environment. Then there
is a definite need for improved measures for
team performance that reflect on the quality
of achievement of strategic objectives. When
we have argued that the global virtual teams
are a means of achieving the objectives, it is a
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Krishna Prasad and K.B. Akhilesh
logical next step to measure how far these
objectives have been met. Very few empirical
studies have been made to date to measure
some of the factors like flexibility, innovation,
access to intellectual talent etc., that are some
of the key objectives for global virtual teams.
Another challenging aspect of global virtual
team design would be the changing nature of
design itself. We have argued that there has to
be an optimal fit between design, objectives,
contextual constraints and work
characteristics. With time, all of these could
change and the team management has to take
appropriate measures to achieve the optimal
fit again. So it would be interesting to build a
dynamic feedback mechanism within the
model to vary the design attributes.
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