Virtual Teams — Support for Technical Communication?

Abstract To work together in virtual teams has increasingly become a natural change in how organizations work. Due to demands from the environment, organizations have had to transform from traditional ways of working to becoming more flexible and adaptive. The aim of this article is to identify obstacles, problems, and presumptions in order to enable the virtual team to be successful. A project — The TIC-project — is described, and results from a study concerning collaboration and networking among companies within Technical Communication are presented. Results show that, to a great extent, experiences from networking are lacking. Furthermore, trust must be embedded in the teams, meaning that personal meetings must precede virtual meetings. Most interviewees declared a wish to collaborate despite being competitors. Finally, questions and topics for further research are presented.

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