Key Issues Which Make Virtual Teams Successful

Working for a company which does business with people or companies that are spread over the country or even worldwide has involved many people in projects and teams that interact virtually. Videoconferences, thousands of e-mails, data requests and exchange, and shared documents are only a few examples of the daily life of non-collocated people who belong to the same work team. Recognizing the growing variety and complexity of communication technology, we identify the critical issues of interpersonal communication within virtual teams and the implications for successful technology adoption. Many research papers have elaborated on critical issues of virtual teams. Most of them emphasize the important role of trust among members of virtual teams. It needs to be mentioned that all aspects have dynamic characteristics. We show that the importance of a single aspect will change over time influencing the technological requirements of adequate communication technology. The purpose of this paper is to create awareness of different factors that influence the decision between different technological support systems, rather than providing detailed recipes to efficiently use a specific communication technology. We give some examples to demonstrate an appropriate fitting of technology to different situations of virtual teams. We refer to previous research to provide the opportunity to use our paper as a basis to analyze the requirements and to derive a technical solution for virtual teams in the real world