Building virtual teams: perspectives on communication, flexibility and trust

As organizations become more globally distributed, and as the fast growth of the Internet, multimedia, and collaborative software environments enable more opportunities for virtual groups to form and conduct business, it is important to understand how the technology affects group interaction. One such company interested in implementing virtual collocation technologies, The Boeing Company, has recently begun to seriously investigate the technology requirements for virtually collocated teams [4]. This paper reports on an empirical study of four virtual teams at The Boeing Company conducted over a three-month period in Spring of 1998. The goal of this research was to gain an understanding of the behavioral effects on work teams who are using such technologies.