Virtual Organization

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Research

The first phase of research into virtual studies was a doctoral dissertation on "Leadership in Virtual Teams". This dissertation was published in June of 1997 and is available from Seattle University.

This researcher defined virtual teams as teams of people who primarily interact electronically and who may meet face-to-face occasionally

Assumptions

The primary assumption was that organizations and individuals will create virtual teams to solve problems not generally possible by more traditional face-to-face means. Organizations need to reduce costs and time-to-solution certainly. But also, because of mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships and alliances, national and international operations, and enterprise-wide projects, there is a need to have people on teams who may not be physically collocated. The secondary assumption was the continuance of the convergence of two fundamental trends: increasing complexity and increasing urgency. Engelbart wrote in Paradigm Shift, February 12, 1992:

The key to dealing with increasing complexity is human collaboration. Many human minds with different perspectives, different specialties, and different experience bases working together and sharing their knowledge, perspectives, and experience would be able to master complex tasks that no single human would be able to master.

Virtual teams may be created to address problems related to these trends in timeframes not possible by traditional teams.

Research Method

Two methods were used for this phase of the research: (1) the Delphi method and (2) a case study. See Chapters 2 and 3 respectively under articles.

Outcome of Research

A summary of the outcome of the research in phase I may be found in the following articles.

Date last revised:
December 29, 2005

David Gould, Ed.D.
daveg@seanet.com