Teamworking virtually: business as usual?

ABSTRACT

The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an ongoing phenomenon: Virtual Teams (VTs) are now a ubiquitous feature of organizations. This undeniable transformation of the way individuals and teams work brings challenges for vital team processes, including coordination, information exchange, and interpersonal relationships, as well as for many other fundamental aspects, such as leadership or emotional exchanges. Understanding the specificity of Virtual teams is the reason behind this Special Section. We aim at pushing research on virtual teams forward, by widening theoretical frameworks that explore the experience of teamworking virtually. In this editorial, we introduce the collected papers highlighting their contributions, and describe four avenues to shape future research on VTs, motivated by those papers.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual teams
• virtuality
• teamwork

Acknowledgments

The Guest Editors wish to acknowledge and thank all the reviewers who participated in the review and decision-making process for the submitted papers to this Special Section. Their willingness to share their knowledge and expertise greatly supported the decisions made by the Guest Editors and helped strengthen the manuscripts in this Special Section. The Guest Editors would also like to thank the EJWOP Editors-in-Chief (Professor Sandra Ohly and Professor Kevin Daniels) who worked with them across a challenging publication process, as it occurred along with different lockdowns across the world due to COVID-19.

Finally, the Guest Editors thank all participants in the SGM, and all authors who submitted a paper for consideration for publication in this Special Section.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).