The term often refers to teleworking teams or those groups of people who use telecommunication technologies to share information and co-operate and collaborate with each other. Virtual Team management is the foundation for managing virtual/telecommunication teamwork.
There are two types of virtual teams, such as follows:
- Global Virtual Team. Members of such a team can be located in different countries and cities all over the world. They can be employees of several companies which join their efforts and resources (incl. people, technology, money) in order to perform common outsourced projects and achieve shared goals.
- Local Virtual Team. Members of a local virtual workgroup usually belong to one and the same company. That company is either big or small, and it has enough resources (technology is essential) to establish and maintain virtual team working and organize its employees into a productive remote group.
Benefits
Some of the advantages of virtual team management are (but not limited to) the following:
- Reduced rents and technology savings
- Lower transportation costs and less time spent on commuting
- Instant communication and information exchange
Some of the disadvantages of virtual team management are (but not limited to) the following:
- Poorer control of virtual groups (this may result in reduced trust in virtual teams), because there are no direct control tools
- Problems to establish good virtual team leadership (comparing to “physical” team leading)
- Unfitness to the projects which require on-site control and management.
