Incorporating Virtual Teamwork Training into MIS Curricula
Authors: Fang Chen; James Sager; G. Corbitt; S. C. Gardiner
Year: 2008

1. INTRODUCTION Over the past decade, advancements in IT have driven an escalating industry trend toward the use of virtual teams to carry out virtual/distributed projects (Evaristo and Fenema 1999; Powell, Piccoli and Ives 2004). Evidence of this trend is the expanding market for "distributed" or "collaborative" project management software. According to a recent report, the market for distributed project management software is expected to increase from nearly 1 billion annually in 2002 to nearly 7.2 billion by 2007 (Collaborative Strategies 2004). In many cases, people use the terms virtual team and distributed team interchangeably. While both terms refer to the teams that rely heavily on computer-mediated communication (CMC), distributed teams have members who are geographically dispersed while a virtual team's members may be very close to one another. Virtuality can be viewed as a continuum with the amount of virtuality measured by the degree of dependence on CMC (Cohen and Gibson, 2003). A team that relies entirely on CMC is more virtual than the one that relies on a mix of face-to-face (FtF) communication and CMC for its interaction. If two teams rely on CMC to the same degree, the team with members on different continents is more highly distributed, but no more virtual than the team with members residing entirely within the same city or located on the same campus. Whereas a team is defined as a group of people working toward a common goal, teamwork refers to the process that the team employs to achieve that goal. It includes any individual or group activities that team members engage in towards completion of the team's objective. In this paper, virtual teamwork is defined as teamwork conducted via CMC regardless of team members' geographical location. Whereas a distributed team will almost certainly need to engage in virtual teamwork to complete its team goal, a collocated team may also need to engage in some amount of virtual teamwork due to team members' dispersion among different floors or buildings and the difficulties of scheduling FtF meetings. Virtual teams provides a variety of potential benefits to organizations by allowing them to secure resources from multiple locations, reduce travel expenses, and possibly generate synergy amongst diverse team members. Furthermore, virtual teamwork allows team members to work from anywhere and anytime that technology permits. As a result, virtual teams and virtual teamwork are pervasive organizational phenomenon. In fact, virtual teams and teamwork are becoming the norm and not the exception (Willmore, 2003, p. 5) Being able to engage in effective virtual teamwork is therefore an important vocational skill for IS professionals and knowledge workers in general. However, due to difficulties involved in communication and coordination, engaging in effective virtual teamwork is not an easy task (Bourgault, Lefebvre, Lefebvre, Pellerin and Elia 2002; Jonsson, Novosel, Lillieskold and Eriksson 2001; Powell et al., 2004). Because nonverbal or para-verbal communication cues are often absent from CMC, virtual team members may experience difficulty interpreting the meaning of messages and non-reply from their team members (Bordia, 1997; Crampton, 2001). In turn, degraded comprehension and increased misunderstanding results in group discussion, negotiation, and consensus building processes that are lengthy and ineffective in comparison to similar FtF interactions (Powell et al., 2004). Prior research has established that collocated teams regularly outperform virtual teams in regards to effective planning and efficient exchange of information (DeMeyer, 1991; Galegher and Kraut, 1994; Powell et al., 2004). Collocated teams may also develop strong interpersonal relationships more readily than virtual teams (Walther, 1996). A number of researchers have suggested interventions that can be employed to improve interpersonal relationship building and the overall performance of virtual teams. …