Identifying critical factors impacting virtual work group performance

Abstract

Virtual teams are an increasingly frequent response to the new competitive environment. Technological advances and global competition have moved virtual teaming from the "good idea" stage to a critical strategy for many organizations. Our understanding of critical factors relative to virtual teams is limited as very few studies have been completed. Virtual teams are characterized as having high social complexity. Jointly optimizing the social and the technical organizational subsystems has been demonstrated by sociotechnical theory to improve overall performance. Consequently, technical system interventions may improve the virtual team's ability to leverage its social system complexity. This paper explores a sociotechnical approach to investigating technical system interventions to enhance virtual team performance.