As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams . drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is. You can look at communication in a team across two axes. In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg :). One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ :) about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else.

15,000 is really short for all there is to say! During the literature review one of the best articles we found is the article called Managing Virtual teams by Lisa Kimball. As Lisa Kimball says: " although the technology that supports these new teams gets most of the attention when we talk about virtual teams, it's really the change in the nature of the teams -not their use of technology- that creates new challenges for team managers and members. " I think this an important observation, virtual teams require us to rethink the group dynamics of teams as we know them.

This paper focused on how one’s online identity may affect virtual team member perceptions and how virtual teams work together. Specifically, we looked at how one’s online identity affects perceptions of anonymity within the team and how that sense of anonymity affects group cohesion and satisfaction. Tags: Research Virtual Worlds Collaboration technology avatar collaboration communication identity instant messaging I just returned from the Academy of Management conference in Chicago where I presented a paper that Surinder and I wrote with Professor Rui Huang .

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discussions, team projects, lectures, written assignments). What might this mean for virtual teams and virtual team leaders? am careful to make too large a leap from this research to best practices for virtual teams, however,  a virtual team working under a leader, may have similar outcomes. That would mean that perceived social presence could have a Surinder and I are currently conducting research on the use of online media such as virtual worlds for education and training. In my readings I came across an interesting article about the perceptions of social

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According to Harvard’s Richard Hackman, a leading expert on teams, there is a widespread belief that teams make us more productive and creative and that they are the best way to get a job done. In a May 2009 Harvard Business Review interview , Professor Hackman cautions us that problems with coordination, motivation, and competition, often cause a team to perform worse than expected. Here are some of his ideas for improving team performance. I

Jill Nemiro, PhD, book author, former actor, and film and video editor, is an expert in virtual teams. It must be close to ten years since I first heard from Jill as she was working on her PhD in an original field: Creativity in Virtual Teams . We've stayed in touch ever since and, when she teamed up with Michael Beyerlein, Lori Bradley, and Susan Beyerlein to pull together The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams , she asked Jeff and me to participate, which we gladly Her dissertation was so good that it was published - and she's gone on to do several more books.

The aim of this post is to illustrate the dynamics between a Community of Practice (CoPs) and a Team. CoPs enable workers to be more effective and capable in their team tasks, by being able to discover people and form cross-functional groups to build their know-how on a topic. What I’m often finding is that we have lots of requests by teams to use the CoP online tools as team spaces, in order to get work and tasks done. Without getting too deep into theory here’s an establishing paragraph on what is a Community of Practice. Communities of Practice

good example is Google Docs , which allows the Leading Virtually team to store documents and collaborate entirely online and at the team’s convenience from any computer with Internet access and no use of our own storage capacity.  While that business model is interesting, and many details of its sustainability are still in question, the interesting side to the Leading Virtually team is what this means for work teams and leaders.  It’s both good and bad that I can’t take my work home.  These days my biggest limitation is technology.