Addressing Virtual Work Challenges: Learning From the Field

Companies increasingly rely on virtual teams. Despite numerous studies examining the challenges of geographically dispersed work, the findings are often mixed. The purpose of this article is to identify themes of challenges associated with virtual collaborations based on academic literature and do a gap analysis with industry trends. First, we identify five overarching categories of virtual team challenges based on reviewing the latest trends in the academic literature: trust and relationships, communication and knowledge sharing, perceptions and decision making, leadership, and diversity. Second, we utilize these categories to qualitatively code and analyze the company data from the Fortune Best Places to Work surveys from 2014 to 2017, using the document analysis technique. Our contribution is to identify similarities and differences in scholarly and industry approaches to addressing virtual teamwork challenges and thus highlight opportunities for development and future research