We use the term team in this book in the commonly accepted sense. That is, the term refers to a collection of four to 12 individuals collaboratively working on a common and interdependent task or goal. The goal is often one requiring a decision or a solution to some problem. The elements of common tasks/ goals and interdependence are integral to our definition of a team, at least in respect to an imposed need to arrive at a collective position on a matter under consideration. In addition, the teams we discuss here are distinguished by one additional factor: the dimension of virtuality.
A group of organizationally or geographically dispersed workers brought together to work on a common project through communication and information technologies is a virtual team (Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1998).
Such a team conducts all or most of its interactions via electronic means (Grosse, 2002). It holds few, if any, face-to-face (F2F) meetings, because its members are not proximate in physical space. In fact, the team members may be widely geographically dispersed—in different countries or on different continents.
Theymay be members of different organizations, brought together due to their expertiseor interests, to find a common solution to a problem.
