SUMMARY—Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research—literally thousands of studies—focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes—processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or ‘‘levers,’ ’ that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools

Advances in information technology, coupled with competitive pressures, have led to the increasing use of virtual teams in organizations. Their growing popularity has attracted the attention of researchers in both information systems and organizational behaviour. Despite the fact that research on this topic is blooming, our understanding of the virtual team phenomenon is still at an embryonic stage and there is much to learn about such teams before we can fully reap their potential benefits. In our view, a preliminary but necessary step is to investigate the multifaceted nature of virtual teams, so as to better define the true object of our investigations. Therefore, this paper first explores a basic definition of what a virtual team truly is and differentiates it from other related concepts such as virtua l group, virtual organization, virtual community, and telecommuting. In a second step, we identify those key characteristics that 1) differentiate virtual teams from conventional ones and 2) distinguish alternative configurations of virtual teams. Lastly, we illustrate how different configurations of virtual teams may raise different challenges and how management strategies must be chosen accordingly to ensure success. Implications for both practice and research are discussed in the conclusion section.

This paper reports findings of a survey of practitioners at a major global IS services firm. The survey sought to explore three questions: (1) Do VT leaders take on a role as technology facilitator, intervening to improve team use of ICT?; (2) If so, can VT leaders ’ technology facilitation role have a critical, positive impact on team success?; and (3) How many ICTs does a VT use and how important they? Evidence was found to answer the first two questions in the affirmative and to address the third. Some interesting leads suggested by the data are explored.

Despite their prevailing growth, little systematic evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of computermediated “virtual ” teams (VTs), especially in relation to their traditional counterpart, face-to-face teams (FtFTs). A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis revealed that FtFTs were more likely to demonstrate higher levels of shared leadership and a constructive interaction style than were VTs. In turn, shared leadership and a constructive interaction style were shown to positively predict cohesion, whereas a defensive interaction style was shown to negatively predict cohesion. Shared leadership was also positively associated with a constructive interaction style and negatively associated with a defensive interaction style. Finally, task performance was shown to be a function of group cohesion.

Innovation is becoming the most important key issue for company’s success in the 21st century. In the competitive environment is necessary for the enterprises to put together different capabilities and services with the goal. It’s a widely accepted that innovation is better achieved by working in team. The employed web services technology, although very popular nowadays but it is still not mature enough, so dealing with it can bring new findings. Virtual teams base on information technology are formed to facilitate transnational innovation processes and it should be noted that innovation has a positive impact on corporate performance. Information and communication technology has brought about significant changes in organizations and produced important benefits, including in the areas of innovation which is recognized as a prime source of national competitive advantage. This contribution proposes a conceptual model for understanding and analyzing the process of virtual R&D team as an innovation and technology assimilation facilitator. The context of the knowledge-based economy introduces a major shift from serial to simultaneous R&D in the way of idea conception to technology creation is conceived. This paper briefly reviews the existing perspectives on virtual teams and their effect on innovation and technology. It also discusses the main characteristics of virtual teams and clarifies the differences aspects of virtual team application in the topic. To support the theoretical analysis, this paper provides a comprehensive review based on authentic and reputed publications. We argue that scanty research has been conducted to facilitate understanding the problem of systematically governing creative innovation toward a technology through virtual R&D teams.

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conference at Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded “best graduate paper ” in the Ph.D.

communities

This paper reports an empirical study that explores how leadership behaviors emerge and are distributed in online student teams, and the relationship of emergent leadership patterns to various outcomes. Two patterns of emergent leadership were identified: strong and weak leadership. Results suggest that weak leadership is at least equally effective and may be more effective than strong leadership in producing positive team outcomes. Weak leadership may also produce interaction patterns more conducive to the educational objectives of a "community of inquiry " model.

www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp When does the medium matter? Knowledge-building experiences and opportunities in decision-making teams Bradley J. Alge, a,* Carolyn Wiethoff,