• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.123-131
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• 2018

A virtual team consists of various members with a range of professional skills. An IT virtual team can confer such advantages as improving creativity and solving problems in e-business. However, virtual teams are less cohesive than off-line based teams, at least partly because they do not meet face-to-face to solve problems. If the cohesion of the members in a team is weak, overall performance can decrease. Therefore, this study seeks to understand the specific types of leadership needed to increase the cohesiveness of the members in a virtual team. Leadership is the most important factor for the successful operation of a virtual team. Leaders engage members with goals, and motivate them by creating positive relationships. This study describes the idealized influence of transformational leadership in which a leader directly engages members in a goal, and the role of participative goal setting in which members set their own goals. In addition, this research demonstrates the benefits of a positive attitude of a leader towards their team members and the influence of leader-member exchanges. If the cohesion of virtual teams is improved through specific leadership, the team members will be more committed to their teams and work, and the team's performance will improve. Furthermore, the successful operation of virtual teams will provide an opportunity for companies in e-business to gain a competitive advantage in the contemporary environment, where creativity is important.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.83-97
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of media symbol variety on group performance in virtual teams. Symbol variety is defined as the number of ways in which information can be communicated and includes Daft and Lengel [1986]'s multiplicity of cues and language variety. According to media richness theory and media synchronicity theory, the use of media with high symbol variety is assumed to facilitate and promote communications among virtual team members. Therefore, it is expected that the media symbol variety is positively associated with group performance in virtual teams. Furthermore, online relationship building is expected to mediate the impacts of symbol variety on the performance. To confirm the suppositions, a controlled lab experiment was conducted with 60 undergraduate students as subjects. In the experimental virtual teams, subjects were allowed to communicate with other members using text-based messenger with emoticons. Subjects in the control virtual teams were allowed to communicate using only text-based messenger. The direct impact of symbol variety on group performance in virtual teams was found insignificant. However, the online relationship was found to completely mediate the positive impact of symbol variety on group performance. The implications and limitations of this study are also discussed for future research.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.109-114
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• 2011

The number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially those involved with research and development (R&D) programs and employed virtual teams to create the greatest competitive advantage from limited labor are increasing. Global and localized virtual R&D teams are believed to have high potential for the growth of SMEs. Due to the fast-growing complexity of new products coupled with new emerging opportunities of virtual teams, a collaborative approach is believed to be the future trend. This research explores the effectiveness of virtuality in SMEs' virtual R&D teams. Online questionnaires were emailed to Malaysian manufacturing SMEs and 74 usable questionnaires were received, representing a 20.8 percent return rate. In order to avoid biases which may result from pre-suggested answers, a series of open-ended questions were retrieved from the experts. This study was focused on analyzing an open-ended question, whereby four main themes were extracted from the experts' recommendations regarding the effectiveness of virtual teams for the growth and performance of SMEs. The findings of this study would be useful to product design managers of SMEs in order to realize the key advantages and significance of virtual R&D teams during the new product development (NPD) process. This is turn, leads to increased effectiveness in new product development's procedure.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-17
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• 2009

Since 'virtual teams' are not bounded by geographical dimensions, culture becomes an important determinant of their success. Though cultural diversity provides unique opportunities to build up new ideas, it can also create problems in the midst of individual interactions and eventually result in poor performance. With little research on this topic, this study examines the relationship between culture and virtual teams' performance. An experiment was conducted followed by the survey based on subjects' perceptions on the experiment. The results show that cultural diversity has significant impact on virtual teams' performance through confusion and conflict in virtual teams. This study empirically proves the fact that conflict is one of the most critical antecedents of a virtual team's performance with high R-square values in both experimental and control groups. In addition, this research introduces and empirically tests a new construct, 'confusion' which turns out to be also important in the virtual team's performance research, and the relationships among confusion, conflict and the virtual team's performance. Next, the findings confirm the importance of studying virtual teams' performance research from the cultural perspective.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.4105-4119
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• 2017

Creativity is crucial in an ever-changing e-business environment. The creation of new value is essential for companies to gain the competitive edge and to pioneer new markets in e-business. Hence, many companies in e-business operate virtual teams as they are suitable to generate creativity. Even so, virtual teams possess the inherent weakness of a lack of cohesiveness. Hence, for a virtual team to be creative, team members should help each other and share information. This study emphasizes the importance of information sharing that is supposed to improve creativity and explains how to increase them for virtual teams. To explain these relationships, three dimensions are routinely examined in organizational behavior studies: leaders, teams, and members. As a consequence, and through empirical analysis, authentic leadership, sharing team climate, and psychological empowerment enhances information sharing and creativity through their respective roles, in addition to information sharing directly increasing creativity. To improve creativity and information sharing of virtual team members in e-business, this article has highlighted the importance of the three roles stated prior. Such factors can increase information sharing and creativity, and will help virtual teams and organizations to be more successful in e-business.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.101-125
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• 2010

This paper uses the status inconsistency theory to identify factors related to team members' (dis)satisfaction with the composition of virtual IT project teams in order to predict their turnover intentions. Our approach is based on the premise that virtual teams, although increasingly popular among global organizations, create an environment replete with cultural and functional diversity. Yet, a paradox exists: increasing diversity in virtual teams maximizes the creation and use of organizational knowledge while simultaneously increasing dissatisfaction and turnover. This is a critical issue in the formation and management of virtual teams. Therefore, we investigate how team members' perceptions of differences among themselves (i.e. foreignness) impact the stability of team membership, leading to what we describe as a 'liability of foreignness.' Findings indicate that a member's perception of foreignness has a detrimental effect on satisfaction with his or her team members while satisfaction is likely to decrease turnover intention. This may be an implication that managers need to maintain a balance in order to discourage member turnover and the loss of key players.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.61-67
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• 2001

A dominant idea is that because virtual members trust one another less than do the non-virtual and therefore the traditional face-to face teams are better than the virtual, the virtual team can be organized to cope with the inevitable, restrictive situation in which they cannot organize a team with face-to-face meetings. However, we believe that even if a manager coping with a certain problem can organize a face-to-face team (evitable situation), there might be some areas or cases in which organizing a virtual team is better than organizing a face-to-face team. This paper suggests it is important for practical managers to identify when(for which situations) the virtual teams are most suitable and can be successful without losing trust.

• The Journal of Korean Institute for Practical Engineering Education
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.24-32
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• 2012

This purpose of study is to identify types of study groups in online learning and the relationships between the types and teams' performance. In order to address these research questions, four study group types are developed based on Neiderman & Beise(1999)'s typology: 1) fully-supported; 2) highly-virtual; 3) traditional; and 4) inactive. And then three study group types are identified based on taxonomy-approach using cluster analysis from 46 teams participated in this study: 1) fully-supported; 2) traditional; 3), and 4) highly-virtual. The result shows that the groups are validated in the latter, except for the inactive type. The result indicates that fully-supported type groups achieved the highest performance, while the highly-virtual type group achieved the lowest performance.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.253-271
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• 2013

Innovation becomes norm rather than exception in today's business, and accordingly firms are working on how to make their employees to work smarter using information systems and technologies. Smart work demands virtual collaboration and cooperation among team members in different places and different time. Sharing of knowledge among team members in these innovative activities are critical in every sense for the successful performance. This study explores the antecedents of knowledge sharing among team members in team-based innovation activities. Five factors (pleasure of knowledge sharing, self-efficacy, management support, rewards, and system usage) are identified through extant review of literature and an instrument is adopted and validated from previous studies. The instrument is adminitered against 138 individuals in and across 54 teams in a telecommunication firm. Except self efficacy, all the paths in the proposed research model is confirmed with different levels of relational coefficients towards the levels of knowledge sharing and innovation activities in teams. Surprisingly, findings indicate that intrinsic pleasure of sharing is most critical than management support, organizational rewards or system usage. This study fills the research gap in team management. Findings provide important implications for managing teams in coming virtual and smart environment.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.112-119
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• 2009

Telecare, one of the e-healthcare services with lCT, is a promising technology which aims to monitor the state of patients and then provide the medical services appropriately in remote sites. Virtual telecare team based on the concept of virtual collaborative teams which consist of a patient, a doctor, and a telecare team, operates on a temporary basis in need. Reputation, which means the degree of a patient's belief to a doctor in consideration, is the most important factor to make the virtual telecare team trustable. In this paper, we propose the fuzzy reputation model of a virtual telecare team, which is a reputation-based trust model based on fuzzy set theory. An illustrative example is also given in order to show the applicability of the model to the concept of a virtual telecare team.